Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

BU's Paul Katsafanas interviewed...

...at 3AM.  An interesting interview; I agree with some things he says, disagree pretty strongly with some others.

'Moral Psychology with Nietzsche'

Coming this March!

Call for Papers for the 4th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies at Brown University in 2019

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 3

The CFP for the next meeting of ISNS is now on-line.  We will be able to cover travel and lodging for speakers whose papers are accepted for presentation (accepted papers will presumptively appear in the annual issue of Inquiry devoted to ISNS papers).  Please note the word limits!  (We'll review papers a bit longer, but they may need to be cut for publication purposes.)  The majority of papers selected during the CFP process have been written by PhD students.

The 4th annual meeting of ISNS will be hosted by Brown University on May 31 and June 1, 2019, thanks to the good efforts of Professor Bernard Reginster.  Confirmed invited speakers are  Taylor Carman (Barnard/Columbia), Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex), and Scott Jenkins (Kansas).  We expect to select two or three additional speakers based on the CFP.

Where to go to study Nietzsche, 2018 edition

Here.

Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche...

...and this review by philosopher and classical scholar Joel Mann (St. Norbert) of a recent Straussian book makes the point quite effectively.

'The Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche Against Guilt' now published on-line...

...here, as part of the annual  ISNS issue of Inquiry.

'The Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche Against Guilt'

The final version of this paper that has evolved over the last five years or so, for those who might be interested.  The abstract:

I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s striking idea of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens), and a partial defense of its import, namely, that no one is ever morally responsible or guilty for what they do and that many of the so-called “reactive attitudes” are misplaced. I focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the arguments as set out in Twilight of the Idols. First, there is Nietzsche’s hypothesis, partly psychological and partly historical or anthropological, that the ideas of “free” action or free will, and of responsibility for actions freely chosen or willed, were introduced primarily in order to justify punishment (“[m]en were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished”). Call this the Genetic Thesis about Free Will. Second, there is Nietzsche’s claim that the moral psychology, or “psychology of the will” as he calls it, that underlies this picture is, in fact, false — that, in fact, it is not true that every action is willed or that it reflects a purpose or that it originates in consciousness. Call these, in aggregate, the Descriptive Thesis about the Will. (Here I draw on earlier work.) Finally, there is articulation of a programmatic agenda, namely, to restore the “innocence of becoming” by getting rid of guilt and punishment based on guilt — not primarily because ascriptions of guilt and responsibility are false (though they are), but because a world understood as “innocent,” one understood in terms of “natural” cause and effect, is a better world in which to live. I focus in particular on a reactive attitude often ignored by philosophers, but of crucial importance for Nietzsche, namely, revenge. I aim to explain and defend Zarathustra’s recommendation: “Enemy’ you shall say, but not villain; sick you shall say, but not scoundrel; fool you shall say, but not sinner.” Nietzsche’s views are contrasted with those of important modern writers on these topics, especially P.F. Strawson and Derk Pereboom.

'Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, Inference to the Best Explanation'

A new draft paper on-line at SSRN; the abstract:

I revisit, refine and defend an inference to the best explanation (IBE) argument for anti-realism about reasons for acting based on the history of intractable disagreement in moral philosophy. The four key premises of the argument are: 1. If there were objective reasons for action, epistemically-well-situated observers would eventually converge upon them after two thousand years; 2. Contemporary philosophers, as the beneficiaries of two thousand years of philosophy, are epistemically well-situated observers; 3. Contemporary philosophers have not converged upon reasons for action; 4. Conclusion: there are no objective reasons for action (IBE from the first three premises). The key premises of the IBE are (1) sentimentalism; (2) non-cognitivism about basic affects; and (3) philosophical arguments for what our reasons for action are always involve a premise that depends on a basic intuitive moral judgment (that can be explained in terms of a basic non-cognitive affect). All these premises are explored in detail, and various objections addressed.

 Comments welcome from those who work on these issues; this version will be presented at a conference in Rome in September, and I won't undertake revisions until after that.

Self-help Nietzsche?

This is not a side of Nietzsche I typically discuss, but I had fun talking about it with British journalist Ben Wilson; it turned into a bit of a free-ranging discussion about Nietzsche beyond the traditional self-improvement genre.

"Nietzsche's Moral Psychology" for the Oxford Handbook

I've posted the penultimate draft of the essay for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology being edited by John Doris (Wash U/St. Louis) and Manuel Vargas (UC San Diego); it is a kind of precis of my forthcoming Moral Psychology with Nietzsche that OUP will publish in 2019 (that book both offers a reading of Nietzsche's moral psychology and a sustained philosophcial and empirical defense of it).

'Nietzsche: The Truth is Terrible'

Everything you need to know in just 2,500 words at the Times Literary Supplement.  (This is not behind a paywall.)

Social science catching up with Nietzsche, part 127: the case of aesthetic pleasure

This; and for an explanation of Nietzsche's view, see this.

"The Truth is Terrible," (super) penultimate version on-line

This is my attempt to make sense of Nietzsche's idea that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence is "justified."   This is the final version, except perhaps for some minor style editing, and will appear in Journal of Nietzsche Studies this fall.  This version is citable.  It will still also appear in  volume of essays that Nietzsche Daniel Came (Lincoln) is editing, but it will be out this fall in JNS.

8th Annual Bonn Summer School in Classical German Philosophy now taking applications

The topic will be "The Issue of Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy."  The primary instructors are Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel.  I'll be giving one of the keynote addresses on Nietzsche's naturalism.  Other keynote lecturers will include Sebastian Gardner (UCL), Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins), and Andrea Kern (Leipzig), among others.

Warwick's Keith Ansell-Pearson interviewed...

...at 3AM.  I confess I'm not a big fan of Ansell-Pearson's Nietzsche work, but he says a couple of things in this interview that seem to me sensible (e.g., his quip about Heidegger's' reading of Nietzsche:  "I find his reading both bombastic and perverse, and it shows a flagrant disregard for Nietzsche’s published texts.")  The claim about Nietzsche being Epicurean is far-fetched, and he exaggerates wildly the neglect of Daybreak (or Dawn as he calls it, either translation is fine).

Jacobin ought to find contributors (or at least editors) who know something about Nietzsche...

...before hosting garbage like this.  Why anyone would bother to analyze Jordan Peterson's "ideas" is already beyond me, but Harrison Fluss, the author, apparently has as superficial a knowledge of Nietzsche as Peterson has of everything.  Fluss, alas, turns out to be a Stony Brook PhD.  I will assume, charitably, that he didn't really study Nietzsche there; if he did, Stony Brook should revoke the doctorate!

(Thanks to David Auerbach for the pointer.)

(Almost) 10 books and/or articles on Nietzsche you should have read in the last 10 years

At my Nietzsche blog.

Thus spoke Goethe

From a review of a recent biography:

He alarmed people as much as he charmed them, not only by his impatience, his sudden flare-ups, and his unpredictable antics, but by his foul language. In moments of exasperation he would denounce as a shithead any of the great men who had assembled at Weimar—Wieland, Herder, Schiller. The best-remembered line from his first play, Götz von Berlichingen, is the robber baron Götz shouting through the window to the emperor’s messenger: “Tell his Imperial Majesty that he can lick my arse”—otherwise known as the Swabian salute.

(Be forewarned, the author of the review clearly does not like Goethe, and it goes off the rails at the end, having the idiotic audacity to associate Goethe with the Holocaust.)

Thus spoke Nietzsche: "The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher"

In the twilight of his sanity, seething with frustration at being so widely ignored, Nietzsche wrote the rhetorically overwrought The Anti-Christ, the one work with the smell of madness about it at many places (he seems to have recovered a bit later that fall of 1888 when he wrote the more ingenious and ironic Ecce Homo).  The book concludes with Nietzsche's proclamation of the "Law Against Christianity," which includes six propositions, of which this is the second:

Any participation in church services is an attack on public morality.  One should be harsher with Protestants than with Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones.  The criminality of being Christian increases with one's proxmity to science.  The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.

"Science" is of course Wissenschaft, so no connotation of natural science, but it does mean a discipline that purports to produce knowledge.

 

 

 

2017 in review: articles posted on SSRN

Over the course of the year, I posted the following articles on SSRN:

"Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law:  A Retrospective Assessment"

"The Roles of Judges in Democracies:  A Realistic View"

"Justifying Academic Freedom:  Mill and Marcuse Revisited"

"Nietzsche and Aestheticism" (originally published in 1992, my first peer-refereed publication)

"Knowledge and Affect:  Perspectivism Revisited"

"Introduction:  Nietzsche's Naturalistic Moral Psychology"

"Why Academic Freedom?"

Better not to be born

Profile of a nihilist, less interesting than Schopenhauer.  He should also read some Nietzsche!

On guilt, shame, and bourgeois child-rearing..

...at The New York Times of course.  They all need to read more Nietzsche.

Psychology catches up with Nietzsche, part 242: consciousness is superficial to the mind's activities

Here; an excerpt:

Most experts think that consciousness can be divided into two parts: the experience of consciousness (or personal awareness), and the contents of consciousness, which include things such as thoughts, beliefs, sensations, perceptions, intentions, memories and emotions.

It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, we argue that this is a mistake.

We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.

(Thanks to Ivan Kelly for the pointer.)

"Nietzsche's Naturalistic Moral Psychology"

I've posted a draft of the introduction giving an overview of my book on Moral Psychology with Nietzsche, forthcoming from Oxford University Press later in 2018.  I hope it might be of interest to some readers.

3rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, March 16-17, 2018: Call for Papers

MOVING TO FRONT FOR LAST TIME--DEADLINE IS NOVEMBER 1

Just a reminder about the call for papers for the third annual meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies which will take place in London next March.  Once again, we will be able to cover the airfare and lodging for those whose papers are accepted during the blind review process.  In each of the first two meetings, two graduate students had their papers selected for presentation and subsequent publication in Inquiry, so once again we encourage submissions from graduate students, as well as faculty.

Thus spake Heinrich Heine

As memorably quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged.

"Knowledge and Affect: Perspectivism Revisited"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 30, 2017 FOR THOSE WHO MIGHT HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE SUMMER

I haven't written a serious paper on the (vexed) topic of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" since 1994, and this new paper has been reworked repeatedly over the last year under dialectical fire from Chris Janaway and especially Ken Gemes, and, originally, from those attending Martin Kusch's illuminating conference on relativism in Vienna almost a year ago.  I did something unusual in this paper, even relative to my own prior work, namely, I focused directly on the only two published passages in which "perspectivism" is discussed.  The results surprised me.  I welcome comments.  

"Nietzsche and Aestheticism," 1992

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 28, FOR THOSE WHO MIGHT HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE SUMMER

This was my first peer-reviewed publication (back in 1992, in Journal of the History of Philosophy), which I thought I'd make more easily available.  Here's the abstract:

Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as a Literature offers an elegant synthesis of themes from other (then au courant) readings of Nietzsche by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Paul DeMan, and Richard Rorty. He effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Nehamas calls "aestheticism." According to aestheticism, "Nietzsche... looks at [the world] as if it were a literary text. And he arrives at many of his views of human beings by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of literary texts and characters". For Nehamas, then, the literary text is Nietzsche's "overarching metaphor" (164), the "model" he "always depended on" (194) in pursuing his philosophical inquiries, "the single thread running through" his work.

I show that aestheticism is, in fact, not Nietzsche’s view, and that Nehamas fails to adduce a single passage from Nietzsche in which he actually embraces aestheticism. I also show how aestheticism leads Nehamas to an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche’s "positive" ethical views. I conclude that this intelligent but sometimes idiosyncratic book is not really about Nietzsche.

Mediocre white person watch: Richard Spencer edition

He read some Nietzsche, didn't get much out of it.  (The linked essay makes a few good points, but for a more serious discussion of related issues, see this review essay of mine.)

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

"Strangers to Ourselves": Themes from German Philosophy and Cognitive Science

I'll be occupied with this conference my Center is hosting here this weekend, so there won't be much new until Monday.  (For those interested, the program:  Download Strangers to Oursevles German Phil Cog Sci--I predict this will be the new growth field!)

3rd annual meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies at Birkbeck, University of London March 16-17, 2018: Call for Papers

I'm pleased to report that the call for papers is now open for the third annual meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies that will take place in London next March.  Once again, we will be able to cover the airfare and lodging for those whose papers are accepted during the blind review process.  In each of the first two meetings, two graduate students had their papers selected for presentation and subsequent publication in Inquiry, so once again we encourage submissions from graduate students, as well as faculty.

London's Barry Smith on overestimating consciousness (as Nietzsche would say)...

...at IAI.

7th annual Bonn Summer School in German Philosophy

This summer's program focuses on "Freedom and Free Will in Classical German Philosophy."  The main teaching is done by Professors Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel; I will be giving one of the keynotes, on Nietzsche, and there will be several other keynote lectures.  Note that they provide financial support to admitted students and that the school is taught in English.

Blogging will be a bit light through the weekend...

...as I'm occupied with preparing for and hosting the annual conference of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies.

"The Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche Against Guilt"

This is a pretty significant revision of a draft paper I first posted in 2013.  It gives a good bit of attention to the reactive attitude of "revenge" that polite philosophers usually ignore.  The abstract:

This is a substantial revision (especially in its second half) of a paper first posted in 2013. I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s striking idea of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens), and a partial defense of its import, namely, that no one is ever morally responsible or guilty for what they do and that many of the so-called “reactive attitudes” are misplaced. I focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the arguments as set out in Twilight of the Idols. First, there is Nietzsche’s hypothesis, partly psychological and partly historical or anthropological, that the ideas of “free” action or free will, and of responsibility for actions freely chosen or willed, were introduced primarily in order to justify punishment (“[m]en were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished”). Call this the Genetic Thesis about Free Will. Second, there is Nietzsche’s claim that the moral psychology, or “psychology of the will” as he calls it, that underlies this picture is, in fact, false — that, in fact, it is not true that every action is willed or that it reflects a purpose or that it originates in consciousness. Call these, in aggregate, the Descriptive Thesis about the Will. (Here I draw on earlier work.) Finally, there is articulation of a programmatic agenda, namely, to restore the “innocence of becoming” by getting rid of guilt and punishment based on guilt — not primarily because ascriptions of guilt and responsibility are false (though they are), but because a world understood as “innocent,” one understood in terms of “natural” cause and effect, is a better world in which to live. I focus in particular on a reactive attitude often ignored by philosophers, but of crucial importance for Nietzsche, namely, revenge. I aim to explain and defend Zarathustra’s recommendation: “Enemy’ you shall say, but not villain; sick you shall say, but not scoundrel; fool you shall say, but not sinner.” Nietzsche’s views are contrasted with those of important modern writers on these topics, especially P.F. Strawson and Derk Pereboom.

 

Three papers chosen by blind review for the 2017 meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies

We received nearly forty papers in response to the CFP for the 2017 meeting of ISNS, and once again chose three papers for presentation at the meeting and for subsequent publication in the special issue of Inquiry devoted to ISNS papers.   Three members of the Executive Committee reviewed and scored each submission (all blind review), producing about ten finalists, which were reviewed by the entire Executive Committee (again blind review).   Once again, many of the strongest submissions, including some that narrowly missed being chosen, were by philosophy PhD students, which is very heartening.   Congratulations to the authors whose papers will be presented at the 2017 ISNS:  they are philosopher Harold Langsam (University of Virginia), and PhD students Ian Dunkle (Boston University) and Claire Kirwin (University of Chicago). 

The papers from the 2016 ISNS conference in Bonn are now available at Inquiry.

Some publications and working papers this year

I appreciate the many blog readers who also read my scholarly writing--it has been one of the best things about the blog for years that it has been a vehicle for sharing my work with other faculty and students across many fields.   In that spirit, here are publications--or working drafts--that I made available this year:

"The Case Against Free Speech" appeared in Sydney Law Review.

"Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law," forthcoming in an OUP volume on Law as Artifact.

"Theoretical Disagreements in Law: Another Look," forthcoming in an OUP volume on Ethical Norms, Legal Norms:  New Essays in Metaethics and Jurisprudence.

"Philosophy of Law," co-authored with Michael Sevel, in the Encyclopedia Britannica (if you can't access the whole essay, google "philosophy of law," it should come up as a top result and you can get the whole essay that way)

"The Paradoxes of Public Philosophy," in the inaugural issue of the Indian Journal of Legal Theory.

"Why Tolerate Religion, Again? A Reply to Michael McConnell," a working paper (but citable) at SSRN.  (McConnell is a leading conservative religious liberty advocate and law professor at Stanford)

"Reply to Five Critics of Why Tolerate Religion?", part of a symposium on my book published by Criminal Law and Philosophy this year.

A revised version of "The Death of God and the Death of Morality," which will eventually appear in a special issue of The Monist on Nietzsche.

"Moralizing Nietzsche's Moral Psycology: The Case of Katsafanas," which also appears at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

"Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects," appeared in 2013 in Social Philosophy and Policy, but I was now able to make the published PDF available on SSRN.

There were actually a couple of other papers I wrote this year that I could not put on SSRN, alas--though hopefully, like the last paper, I will be able to post them in the future after publication.

Blast from the past: Nietzsche and Ayn Rand

I love Nietzsche, for his wickedness, truthfulness, and posing the most serious challenge to Marx, but he's got nothing to do with Ayn Rand.  Poor Fred!  A literate, sensitive, psychologically astute intellect and champion of aesthetic excellence, a thinker of world-historic significance, conjoined with a sophomoric apparatchik of bankers and flatterer of narcissistic mediocrities!  Could there be a more grotestque irony?

I try to let most stupidity pass in silence...

...but in a world with lots of blogs run by people with varying levels of knowledge, sometimes stupidity finds an audience, and innocents need to be warned.  The only thing that Babette Babich knows less about than the Continental traditions in post-Kantian European philosophy is what is going on in Anglophone "analytic" philosophy, but on neither topic is she an informed or reliable commentator.   As one commenter correctly remarked:

I think you do the Continental Philosophy tradition a serious disservice by raising this (to my mind very important) topic in the context of a rant by Babich and one of her acolytes. She’s well known to try to discredit speakers at Continental Philosophy conferences by insulting them on Twitter (sometimes with the retort that they are secretly “Analytic”, and sometimes with more mundane insults). She’s barely taken seriously by Continental Philosophers anymore, except for a small die-hard crop of apologists who are thankfully diminishing in numbers fast.

And another patient commenter, Jonathan Mitchell, responds effectively on the "merits" of this intellectual muddle:

As someone who writes on Nietzsche I find much of what Babich has to say quite poorly motivated (for reasons I will explain below). But first I want to start by quoting Babich’s definition of ‘continental philosophy’:

The question the interviewer sets up is this:

“CC If, as I am suggesting, logical argumentation is at the heart of the analytic methods, can you express the essence of the continental practices in philosophy?”

“BB: Continental philosophy includes a historical sense, a sense of historical context which it does not name ‘the history of philosophy.’ If Heidegger writes about Anaximander he is not reflecting on philosophy’s history as if this were a thing once done, passé, whereas we now, today, do some other sort of thing when we ‘do’ philosophy. At the same time the continental tradition also emphasizes everything that has to do with context, with interpretation, as a difference that makes all the difference.”

For starters, there is no obvious reason why one can’t study philosophy with a ‘historical sense’, where this involves paying due attention to historical context, and at the same time be involved in ‘logical argumentation’, if by the later one is taken to mean providing reasons, arguments and evidence for the claims one makes (especially, but not least, claims of exegesis). The two would only seem mutually exclusive if one had an incredibly narrow understanding of what ‘logical argumentation’ amounted to (i.e. equivalent to applying the most abstract of formal logical methods which is not the trend in Nietzsche studies!).

Blast from the past: "Some Thoughts on Nietzsche and Foucault"

Here.  And for my more developed take on Foucault, see this paper.

Call for Papers for the 2nd Annual meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies here in Chicago, March 3-4, 2017

MOVING TO FRONT FOR LAST TIME--ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 4

The CFP is here. Two of the three papers chosen last year were by PhD students.  We are able to cover travel and lodging costs for those whose papers are chosen.  All papers presented at ISNS appear in a special issue of Inquiry each year.

"The Death of God and the Death of Morality," a new version...

...improved again, I think, by workshops at both Berkeley and Chicago, as well as other feedback.  The paper will appear in a special issue of The Monist on Nietzsche, to be edited by Ken Gemes (Birkbeck, London).

Georgia State's Jessica Berry to be the new editor of "Journal of Nietzsche Studies"

It gives me particular pleasure to share this announcement:

New editorial leadership at the Journal of Nietzsche Studies—The JNS editorial board and Penn State University Press warmly welcome Jessica N. Berry, Associate Professor of Philosophy Georgia State University, as the new Executive Editor for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Professor Berry is an expert in the field and the author of Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition and numerous articles on Nietzsche and antiquity. For nearly four years, she has served as Associate Editor for the journal and brings considerable experience with content editing and development. Along with this transition, the Philosophy Department at Georgia State University will become the new editorial home for the journal.

The outgoing Executive Editor, Christa Acampora (Hunter College/CUNY), deserves credit for reviving the journal and making it, for the first time, an important forum for Nietzsche scholarship.   I am confident that Professor Berry will build on Professor Acampora's work, and establish JNS as the premier forum for Nietzsche scholarship in the world.

"Moralizing Nietzsche's Moral Psychology: The Case of Katsafanas"

This new review essay may interest some readers; a version will appear in NDPR soon (those interested can cite and quote from either the SSRN version or the NDPR version when it appears):

This review essay discusses Paul Katsafanas’s The Nietzschean Self (Oxford, 2016), which purports to offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, including questions such as “reflection’s role in action, the genuine action/mere behavior distinction, the nature of evaluative judgment, the structure of human motivation, the possibility of freedom, and the nature of responsibility.” Katsafanas also claims that Nietzsche “wants to understand how ethical claims are justified” (hereafter, the problem of “normative authority”), although no textual evidence is ever adduced anywhere in the book showing Nietzsche to be concerned with this question.

I argue that (1) Katsafanas’s claim that Nietzsche thinks that only conscious mental states are conceptually articulated is not supported by the texts and trades on Katsafanas’s own confusion between linguistic and conceptual articulation, one that vitiates many of the arguments in the book; (2) Katsafanas has a more successful account of the role of drives in Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology and their influence on conscious reflection; (3) Katsafanas’s attempt to resist the import of the latter account for Nietzsche’s ideas about free will and the role of conscious deliberation depends on misrepresentations of the texts and philosophical confusions about the thesis that consciousness is epiphenomenal; (4) Katsafanas misrepresents Schiller’s views about the “unity” of a self, and thus fails to refute the popular view in the literature that unity, for Nietzsche, is a matter of unity among a person’s drives; and (5) many of Katsafanas’s mistakes, and especially his frequent carelessness with Nietzsche’s texts, are best-explained by his desire to construe Nietzsche’s moral psychology as responding to the problem of normative authority.

In the end, the “Nietzschean moral psychology” of this book is largely Katsafansas’s invention, occasionally inspired by snippets from Nietzsche.

His 2013 book on Nietzschean Constitutivism--putting aside the interpretive issues, which took a backseat there--is more interesting and successful in my view.  It also involves far fewer philosophical mistakes than the new book.

UPDATE:  I uploaded a very slightly revised version today, August 12.   The main difference comes in the treatment of nonconceptual content and psychological explanation at 3-4.

On study of the humanities

A nicely written essay by Zena Hitz (St. John's College, Annapolis).  It offers an interesting defense of a decidedly Christian understanding of the "interiority" and "dignity" of humanistic reflection (also a Platonic one, though as Nietzsche said, "Christianity is Platonism for the people") against the neoliberal ("the humanities produce people who are useful for capitalism") and liberal ("the humanities make people good democratic citizens") defenses of humanistic study.  As Nietzsche notes in the Genealogy, the "slave revolt" in morality made human beings interesting, giving them interior lives.   And the humanities (here understood capaciously to include the cognitive sciences generally) are, when done well and seriously (e.g., not Badiou studies!), are precisely those that help one become a human being who is "interesting."   That concern has no resonance for the neoliberal or liberal defenses of the humanities.  Since our age is still neoliberal to its core, that means humanistic study is doomed in the neoliberal countries.  But it will likely return elsewhere. 

What do readers think of Prof. Hitz's interesting essay?

"Five Books on Nietzsche"

A reader recently wrote to ask some questions about this interview from a few years back, and since, on re-reading it, I still agree with it, I thought I'd post it again for interested readers.

Moral philosophy and empirical psychology

Tamsin Shaw (whose fine work on Nietzsche I've written about here and here) had an essay in the NYRB that discussed recent work in moral psychology by psychologists (some of it spectacularly and notoriously confused, like Joshua Greene's stuff) and the involvement of Martin Seligman and the "Positive Psychology" movement in the CIA's torture program.  This was unfair and misleading, I thought, a kind of slippery guilt by association.  Two psychologists, Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, now reply, and Shaw replies to them (same link).   I'm not a big fan of Haidt or Pinker (though they've each done interesting work, though both fall short in interpreting the philosophical import of their own results), but I think their position in this debate is the slightly stronger one here.  I'll write something more substantive at a later date, but I thought readers here might find the back and forth interesting. 

"Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects"

This paper appeared in Social Philosophy & Policy over two years ago, but I'm now able to make it available on-line.  Here's the abstract:

This essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to Nietzsche, as I reconstruct his view, moral judgments result from the interaction of two kinds of affective responses: first, a “basic affect” of inclination toward or aversion from certain acts, and then a further affective response (the “meta-affect”) to that basic affect (that is, sometimes we can be either inclined towards or averted from our basic affects). I argue that Nietzsche views basic affects as noncognitive, that is, as identifiable solely by how they feel to the subject who experiences the affect. By contrast, I suggest that meta-affects (I focus on guilt and shame) sometimes incorporate a cognitive component like belief. After showing how this account of moral judgment comports with a reading of Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I have offered in previous work, I conclude by adducing philosophical and empirical psychological reasons for thinking that Nietzsche's account of moral judgment is correct.

"The Death of God and the Death of Morality," revised

It's quite a bit revised from earlier versions:  Jessica Berry (Georgia State) persuaded me that my treatment of moral responsibility and guilt was difficult to square with passages in the Genealogy; and Joshua Cohen and colleagues at Berkeley forced me to expand the critique of Rawls, though I still think Arneson's criticism is basically correct.  And many others helped on many points of detail, so with thanks to them all, here's a new version.

Congratulations to the authors of papers selected for the first annual meeting of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies in Bonn this June

The response to the Call for papers was extremely gratifying--we had nearly 50 submissions, which, for those of us who have done program committee work for the old North American Nietzsche Society (admittedly, during its years of decline under the Schacht dictatorship), was remarkable, since 10 or 12 submissions was the norm, with many being obviously unacceptable.   By contrast, this pool of papers was extremely impressive.  Two members of the Executive Committee blind reviewed each submission, from which we came up with not quite ten finalists.  The whole Executive Committee then reviewed each of the finalists (again, entirely blind review), and there was consensus on three papers, two, as it turns out, by advanced PhD students, Jonathan Mitchell at the University of Warwick and Avery Snelson at the University of California at Riverside, and one by an established scholar, Christopher Janaway (University of Southampton).   I am especially pleased that two PhD students (from excellent programs) prevailed with excellent papers in this blind review competition:  it bodes well for the future of the field.  All three papers will be presented along with the invited papers at the inaugural conference in Bonn.