The paper provides a thorough account of the relationship between Ernst Mach’s thought and that of an apparently more intellectually distant near-contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. The consistency of their views is in fact substantial, as I try to show within the paper. Despite their interests being different, both Mach and Nietzsche were concerned with the same issues about our intellectual relationship with the external world, dealing with the same questions and pursuing a common aim of eliminating worn-out philosophical conceptions. Moreover, it (...) can be argued that both Mach and Nietzsche converged on what we now know as the problem of realism versus anti-realism in the philosophy of science, and that they both rejected ‘representational’ (realist) conceptions of science in favour of a certain sort of pragmatic anti-realism, whose focus was on the role science plays as a means of orientation. (shrink)

This Element explains Nietzsche's ethics in his late works, from 1886 onwards. The first three sections explain the basics of his ethical theory – its context and presuppositions, its scope and its central tension. The next three sections explore Nietzsche's goals in writing a history of Christian morality, the content of that history, and whether he achieves his goals. The last two sections take a broader look, respectively, at Nietzsche's wider philosophy in light of his ethics and at the prospects (...) for a Nietzschean ethics after Nietzsche. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has shown Nietzsche to offer an original and insightful moral psychology centering on a motivational feature he calls ‘will to power.’ In many places, though, Nietzsche presents will to power differently, as the ‘essence of life,’ an account of ‘organic function,’ even offering it as a correction to physiologists. This paper clarifies the scope and purpose of will to power by identifying the historical physiological view at which Nietzsche directs his criticisms and by identifying his purpose in doing (...) so. Nietzsche’s criticism, it is argued, is a widespread and pre-Darwinian description of the basic dispositions of organisms and their internal processes. The purpose of this criticism is to undermine the efforts of Herbert Spencer and Arthur Schopenhauer to derive moral-psychological insights from that description. The paper concludes that Nietzsche’s proposal to conceive of ‘organic function’ in terms of will to power is of little import for his moral psychology besides clearing away competing views. (shrink)

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other (...) hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree. (shrink)

Nietzsche appears to adopt a radical Kantian view of objects called constructivism, which holds that the existence of all objects depends essentially on our practices. This essay provides a new reconstruction of Nietzsche's argument for constructivism and responds to five pressing objections to reading Nietzsche as a constructivist that have not been addressed by commentators defending constructivist interpretations of Nietzsche.

The continued presence and importance of Christian moral values in our daily lives, coupled with the fact that faith in Christianity is in continual decline, raises the question as to why having lost faith in Christianity, we have also not lost faith in our Christian moral values. This question is also indicative of a more pressing phenomenon: not only have we maintained our faith in Christian values, we fail to see that the widespread collapse of Christianity should affect this faith. (...) To tackle this latter phenomenon, I claim, we have to pose the Nietzschean question of the value of our moral values, so as to see that this value can be a possible object of questioning. In chapter one, I consider different approaches found in the history of moral philosophy that look like potential candidates for this task. I argue that, ultimately, the task requires simultaneously taking our familiarity with Christian moral values as both sui generis and a questionable phenomenon. In chapter two, I articulate in detail the sui generis nature of this familiarity with moral values,in terms of the phenomena of habituation and sedimentation. In chapter three, I consider the possibility of estrangement that is built into our familiarity with moral values, by focusing on the role of cognition. I demonstrate how cognition, in the form of self-consciousness, can disrupt the sedimented, habituated nature of our moral values through a form of ironic disruption. In chapter four, I develop this account by considering the possibility of an appeal to an alternative moral outlook. To do so, I draw upon the structural isomorphism that is present between the process of estrangement and a rite of passage. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe know from Nietzsche’s posthumously published notebooks and correspondence of his plan in 1868 to compose a doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the subject of teleology in nature and the concept of the organic, with reference to Kant. The bulk of my discussion represents an attempt to extrapolate from Nietzsche’s letters and preparatory notes the view he arrived at. Since the notes do not defend explicitly any single definitive thesis, their interpretation is unavoidably conjectural. I argue that, if Nietzsche’s remarks (...) are considered with close reference to the philosophers who at that point dominated his horizons, namely Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, with Goethe also playing a key role, a plausible account can be given of the broad conclusions Nietzsche reached as a result of his early engagement with the problem of teleology. This outlook maintains the necessity and distinctiveness of philosophical reflection, but takes a skeptical view of its basis. In 1868 Nietzsche had no clear idea of how to proceed from this point, but in the end I propose, as others have done, that Nietzsche’s reflections on Kant and teleology helped to lay the ground for The Birth of Tragedy. In conclusion, I hypothesize that Nietzsche’s later philosophy involves no change of metaphilosophical standpoint. (shrink)

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é esboçar os traços de uma antropologia nietzschiana que sustente um processo de transformação humana. Na primeira parte, antropologia literária, argumento que sua antropologia resgata a noção grega arcaica da natureza como arte ou cultura. Na segunda parte, antropologia científica, apresento o método científico de Nietzsche e de Freud em sua aproximação filosófica da questão da natureza. Na terceira e última parte, antropologia transformadora, discuto o desafio da renaturalização do ser humano, isto é, compreender não (...) apenas o que somos como seres humanos, mas também do que podemos nos tornar, questão que ilustro apelando para a ideia do “além-do-homem” de Nietzsche.: The purpose of this article is to sketch traces of a Nietzschean anthropology that supports a process of human transformation. In the first part, literary anthropology, I argue that his anthropology recovers Greek notion of nature as art and culture. In the second part, scientific anthropology, I present Nietzsche’s and Freud’s scientific method and its philosophical approach to the question of nature. In the third part, transformational anthropology, I discuss the challenge of renaturalizing human being, i. e., of understanding not only what we are as human beings, but also what we might become, issue that I illustrate by relating it to the Nietzschean overman. (shrink)