Philosophy and Critical Theory

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Philosophy and Critical Theory STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS PHILOSOPHY AND CRITICAL THEORY 20% DISCOUNT ON ALL TITLES 2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche .......... 2-3 Political Philosophy ................ 3-5 Ethics and Moral Philosophy ..................................5-6 Phenomenology and Critical Theory ..........................6-8 Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics ...................................8-9 Cultural Memory in the Present .................................9-11 Now in Paperback ....................... 11 Examination Copy Policy ........ 11 The Case of Wagner / Unpublished Fragments ORDERING Twilight of the Idols / from the Period of Human, Use code S21PHIL to receive a 20% discount on all ISBNs The Antichrist / Ecce Homo All Too Human I (Winter listed in this catalog. / Dionysus Dithyrambs / 1874/75–Winter 1877/78) Visit sup.org to order online. Visit Nietzsche Contra Wagner Volume 12 sup.org/help/orderingbyphone/ Volume 9 Friedrich Nietzsche for information on phone Translated, with an Afterword, orders. Books not yet published Friedrich Nietzsche Edited by Alan D. Schrift, by Gary Handwerk or temporarily out of stock will be Translated by Adrian Del Caro, Carol charged to your credit card when This volume presents the first English Diethe, Duncan Large, George H. they become available and are in Leiner, Paul S. Loeb, Alan D. Schrift, translations of Nietzsche’s unpublished the process of being shipped. David F. Tinsley, and Mirko Wittwar notebooks from the years in which he developed the mixed aphoristic- The year 1888 marked the last year EXAMINATION COPY POLICY essayistic mode that continued across of Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual the rest of his career. These notebooks Examination copies of select titles career and the culmination of his comprise a range of materials, includ- are available on sup.org. philosophical development. In that ing drafts of aphorisms that would To request one, find the book you final productive year, he worked on appear in both volumes of Human, All are interested in and click Request six books, all of which are now, for Too Human. Additionally, there are Review/Desk/Examination Copy. the first time, presented in English extensive notes for never-completed You can request either a free in a single volume. Together these publications and detailed reading notes digital copy or a physical copy new translations provide a funda- on philologists, philosophers, and to consider for course adoption. mental and complete introduction historians of his era. A nominal handling fee applies to Nietzsche’s mature thought and for all physical copy requests. to the virtuosity and versatility of Here, we trace more closely Nietzsche’s his most fully developed style. development of ideas that remain @stanfordpress central to his mature philosophy, Scrupulously edited, this critical such as the contrast between free and volume also includes commentary facebook.com/ constrained spirits, the interplay of stanforduniversitypress by esteemed Nietzsche scholar national, supra-national, and personal Andreas Urs Sommer. Through this identities, and the cultural centrality of Blog: stanfordpress. new collection, students and scholars Bildung as education and cultivation. typepad.com are given an essential introduction to 560 pages, August 2021 Nietzsche’s late thought. 9781503614840 Paper $25.00 $20.00 sale 816 pages, January 2021 9781503612549 Paper $25.00 $20.00 sale 2 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Unpublished Fragments Political Grammars Surging Democracy (Spring 1885–Spring 1886) The Unconscious Foundations Notes on Hannah Arendt’s Volume 16 of Modern Democracy Political Thought Friedrich Nietzsche Davide Tarizzo Adriana Cavarero Translated, with an Afterword, Davide Tarizzo takes up the problem In this provocative new work, Adriana by Adrian Del Caro of modern democratic, liberal peoples Cavarero weighs in on contemporary This volume provides the first —how to define them, how to explain debates about the relationship between English translation of all Nietzsche’s their invariance over time, and how to democracy, happiness, and dissent. unpublished notes from the period differentiate one people from another. Drawing on Arendt’s understanding of in which he wrote his breakthrough Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan’s politics as a participatory experience, philosophical books Beyond Good theory of the subject enables us to and also work by Émile Zola, Elias and Evil and On the Genealogy of clearly distinguish between the notion Canetti, Boris Pasternak, Roland Morality. Keen to reinvent himself of personal identity and the notion Barthes, and Judith Butler, Cavarero of subjectivity, and this distinction is afterThus Spoke Zarathustra, the proposes a new view of democracy, critical to understanding the nature philosopher used these notes to based not on violence, but rather on the of nations whose sense of nationhood chart his search for a new philo- spontaneous experience of a plurality does not rest on any self-evident sophical voice. The notebooks reveal of bodies coming together in public. identity or pre-existent cultural or his deep concern for Europe and With this timely intervention Cavarero ethnic homogeneity. Introducing the suggests democracy’s emergence thrives its future. We learn what Nietzsche concept of “political grammar”—the was reading and from whom he on the nonviolent creativity of a conditions of political subjectifica- widespread, participatory, and relational borrowed, and we find considerable tion that enable the enunciation of power shared horizontally rather than notes and fragments from the an emergent “we”—Tarizzo argues vertically. From digital democracy to non-book “Will to Power.” Richly democracy flourishes when the contemporary protest movements, annotated and accompanied by a opening between subjectivity and Cavarero argues that we need to rethink detailed translator’s afterword, this identity is maintained. As he compel- our focus on individual happiness and landmark volume sheds light on lingly demonstrates, democracy can the controversy surrounding the be productively perceived as a process rediscover birth through plural interac- Nachlass of the 1880s. of never-ending recovery from a lack tion. Let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together. 616 pages, 2019 of clear national identity. 9781503608726 Paper $25.00 $20.00 sale “A brilliant psychoanalytic exploration “An inspiring vision of what democracy might mean.” of unconscious communities.” —Silvia Benso, —John P. McCormick, author of Viva Voce University of Chicago 144 pages, August 2021 SQUARE ONE: FIRST-ORDER $17.60 sale QUESTIONS IN THE HUMANITIES 9781503628137 Paper $22.00 280 pages, April 2021 9781503615311 Paper $25.00 $20.00 sale POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 3 Across the Great Divide The Last Years of Karl Marx Limits Between Analytic and Continental An Intellectual Biography Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Political Theory Environmentalists Should Care Marcello Musto Jeremy Arnold Giorgos Kallis In the last years of his life, Karl The division between analytic Marx expanded his research in Western culture is infatuated with and continental political theory new directions—studying recent the dream of going beyond, even remains as sharp as it is wide, anthropological discoveries, as it is increasingly haunted by the rendering basic problems seemingly analyzing communal forms of specter of apocalypse: drought, intractable. Across the Great Divide ownership in precapitalist societies, famine, nuclear winter. Re-reading offers an account of how this split supporting the populist movement Thomas Robert Malthus and his has shaped the field and suggests in Russia, and expressing critiques legacy, this book reclaims, redefines, means of addressing it. Rather of colonial oppression. With The and makes an impassioned plea for than advocating a synthesis of Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello limits—a notion central to environ- these philosophical modes, Arnold Musto claims a renewed relevance mentalism—clearing them from argues for aporetic cross-tradition for the late work of Marx, high- their association with Malthusian- theorizing: bringing together both lighting unpublished or previously ism and the ideology and politics traditions in order to show how neglected writings, many of which that go along with it. Limits are not something out there, a property of each is at once necessary remain unavailable in English. nature to be deciphered by scien- and limited. Readers are invited to reconsider tists, but a choice that confronts us, Marx’s critique of European colonial- Engaging with a range of fundamen- one that, paradoxically, is part and ism, his ideas on non-Western tal political concepts and theorists— parcel of the pursuit of freedom. societies, and his theories on the including the work of Stanley Cavell, Taking us from ancient Greece to possibility of revolution in non- Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, Malthus, from hunter-gatherers capitalist countries. From Marx’s John Rawls, and Jacques Derrida— to the Romantics, from anarchist late manuscripts, notebooks, and Arnold shows how we can better feminists to 1970s radical environ- letters emerges an author markedly understand and address the pressing mentalists, Limits shows us how an different from the one represented political issues of civil freedom and institutionalized culture of sharing by many of his contemporary state justice today. can make possible the collective critics and followers alike. self-limitation we so urgently
Recommended publications
  • Nietzsche and Aestheticism
    University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1992 Nietzsche and Aestheticism Brian Leiter Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and Aestheticism," 30 Journal of the History of Philosophy 275 (1992). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Notes and Discussions Nietzsche and Aestheticism 1o Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: L~fe as Literature' has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception since its publication in 1985 . Reviewed in a wide array of scholarly journals and even in the popular press, the book has won praise nearly everywhere and has already earned for Nehamas--at least in the intellectual community at large--the reputation as the preeminent American Nietzsche scholar. At least two features of the book may help explain this phenomenon. First, Nehamas's Nietzsche is an imaginative synthesis of several important currents in recent Nietzsche commentary, reflecting the influence of writers like Jacques Der- rida, Sarah Kofman, Paul De Man, and Richard Rorty. These authors figure, often by name, throughout Nehamas's book; and it is perhaps Nehamas's most important achievement to have offered a reading of Nietzsche that incorporates the insights of these writers while surpassing them all in the philosophical ingenuity with which this style of interpreting Nietzsche is developed. The high profile that many of these thinkers now enjoy on the intellectual landscape accounts in part for the reception accorded the "Nietzsche" they so deeply influenced.
    [Show full text]
  • The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman Frontmatter More Information
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-81659-5 - Friedrich Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman Frontmatter More information CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-81659-5 - Friedrich Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman Frontmatter More information CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Series editors KARL AMERIKS Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame DESMOND M. CLARKE Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork The main objective of Cambridge Textsin the History of Philosophy is to expand the range, variety and quality of texts in the history of philosophy which are available in English. The series includes texts by familiar names (such as Descartes and Kant) and also by less well-known authors. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. The volumes are designed for student use at undergraduate and postgraduate level and will be of interest not only to students of philosophy, but also to a wider audience of readers in the history of science, the history of theology and the history of ideas. For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism
    © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. CHAPTER ONE The Rise and Fall of Nietzschean Anti- Semitism REACTIONS OF ANTI- SEMITES PRIOR TO 1900 Discussions and remarks about Jews and Judaism can be found throughout Nietzsche’s writings, from the juvenilia and early letters until the very end of his sane existence. But his association with anti-Semitism during his life- time culminates in the latter part of the 1880s, when Theodor Fritsch, the editor of the Anti- Semitic Correspondence, contacted him. Known widely in the twentieth century for his Anti- Semites’ Catechism (1887), which appeared in forty- nine editions by the end of the Second World War, Fritsch wrote to Nietz sche in March 1887, assuming that he harbored similar views toward the Jews, or at least that he was open to recruitment for his cause.1 We will have an opportunity to return to this episode in chapter five, but we should observe that although Fritsch erred in his assumption, from the evidence he and the German public possessed at the time, he had more than sufficient reason to consider Nietzsche a like- minded thinker. First, in 1887 Nietzsche was still associated with Richard Wagner and the large circle of Wagnerians, whose ideology contained obvious anti- Semitic tendencies. Nietzsche’s last published work on Wagner, the deceptive encomium Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), may contain the seeds of Nietzsche’s later criticism of the composer, but when it was published, it was regarded as celebratory and a sign of Nietzsche’s continued allegiance to the Wagnerian cultural move- ment.
    [Show full text]
  • Islam in Apocalyptic Perspective the History of American Apocalyptic Thought Offers Much Reason for Discouragement
    Islam in Apocalyptic Perspective The history of American apocalyptic thought offers much reason for discouragement. Christians have been too eager to gloss biblical prophecy with extra-biblical assertions and morbid scenarios of Islam’s demise. Christian Reflection Prayer A Series in Faith and Ethics Scripture Reading: Mark 13:28-37 Meditation† There is certainly a shadowy and sinister side to apocalyptic, or should we say pseudo-apocalyptic,…[that encourages] sectarian- ism and exclusivism…. Focus Article: Here we can appeal to the apocalyptic vision itself, which is Islam in Apocalyptic universal and cosmic. God’s redemptive act in Jesus Christ Perspective restores humanity and the entire created order, and we move (Apocalyptic Vision, toward the end of history not aimlessly, but with the renewing pp. 46-53) and transforming of divine energies within us…. What is God’s intent? The redemption of humanity and the cosmos. That should be our interpretive lens. There is nothing in apocalyptic theology that demands that our outlook be sectarian or exclusive. Scott M. Lewis, S.J. Reflection Many Christians want to know more about Islamic practices, the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’an, and how Muslim societies are organized. They may be ministering to Muslim immigrants or meeting new coworkers, guiding missionary projects or organizing business activities around the world, traveling more widely or retreating in fear of jihadist violence. Unfortunately, looming over their newfound interest are the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Some are misconstruing Islam through events in Revelation. “The horrific collapse of the World Trade Center towers might well turn one’s thoughts to the apocalypse, but something more than horror is What do you think? at work,” Thomas Kidd writes.
    [Show full text]
  • Bible Verses: 1 John 4:1-6 Beloved, Do Not Trust Every Spirit but Test The
    Overcoming the Spirit of the Antichrist Bible verses: 1 John 4:1-6 Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus* does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world. You belong to God, children, and you have conquered them, for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They belong to the world; accordingly, their teaching belongs to the world, and the world listens to them. We belong to God, and anyone who knows God listens to us, while anyone who does not belong to God refuses to hear us. This is how we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of deceit. Ask everyone in the group to have their Bibles with them. Ask one person to read the passage out loud. Encourage them to have their pens and to underline things that strike them, especially later when you go through the key words and phrases. Also, encourage them to make notes. After the reading of the passage is complete, explain the context. Context “The Community of the Beloved Disciple” had the Jews to reject them. They had the Romans to reject them.
    [Show full text]
  • Traces of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy
    Traces of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Scandinavian Literature Crina LEON* Key-words: Scandinavian literature, Nietzschean philosophy, Georg Brandes, August Strindberg, Knut Hamsun 1. Introduction. The Role of the Danish Critic Georg Brandes The age of Friedrich Nietzsche in Scandinavia came after the age of Émile Zola, to whom Scandinavian writers such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg were indebted with a view to naturalistic ideas and attitudes. Friedrich Nietzsche appears to me the most interesting writer in German literature at the present time. Though little known even in his own country, he is a thinker of a high order, who fully deserves to be studied, discussed, contested and mastered (Brandes 1915: 1). This is what the Danish critic Georg Brandes asserted in his long Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, which was published in August 1889 in the periodical Tilskueren from Copenhagen, and this is the moment when Nietzsche became to be known not only in Scandinavia but also in other European countries. The Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries (Ibidem: 59), wrote Brandes ten years later. The term Aristocratic Radicalism had been previously used by the Danish critic in a letter he wrote to Nietzsche himself, from Copenhagen on 26 November 1887: …a new and original spirit breathes to me from your books […] I find much that harmonizes with my own ideas and sympathies, the depreciation of the ascetic ideals and the profound disgust with democratic mediocrity, your aristocratic radicalism […] In spite of your universality you are very German in your mode of thinking and writing (Ibidem: 63).
    [Show full text]
  • Publications HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT Stanford University
    Publications HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT Stanford University [March 2015]* 1. Books 1.1 Funktionswandel und Rezeption. Studien zur Hyperbolik in literarischen Texten des romanischen Mittelalters. München 1972. 1.2 Literaturkritik. BSV-Studienmaterial. München 1973. 1.3 Emile Zola im historischen Kontext. Für eine neue Lektüre des Rougon-Macquart- Zyklus. München 1978. 1.4 Funktionen parlamentarischer Rhetorik in der Französischen Revolution. Vorstudien zur Entwicklung einer historischen Textpragmatik. München 1978 [Portuguese translation under the title: As funçoes da retórica parlamentar na Revoluçao francesa. Belo Horizonte [Editora UFMG] 2003]. 1.5 Sozialgeschichte ästhetischer Erfahrung. Hagen [Fernuniversität] 1984. 1.6 Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur. Frankfurt 1990 [available as CD Rom at Directmedia [2004]]. 1.7 Making Sense in Life and Literature [English translation of publications [5.11], [5.22], [5.39], [5.43], [5.44], [5.45], [5.53], [5.69], [5.81], [5.84] and [5.88] by Glen Burns, and first publication of [5.112]]. Preface by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis 1992. 1.8 In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time. Cambridge [Harvard University Press] 1997 [Portuguese translation under the title: Em 1926. Vivendo no Limite do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro [Editora Record] 1999 / German translation under the title: 1926. Ein Jahr am Rand der Zeit. Frankfurt [Suhrkamp Verlag] 2001; second edition / softcover, 2003 / Spanish translation under the title: 1926 – viviendo al borde del tiempo [Editorial Iberoamericana], Mexico City 2004 / Spanish translation forthcoming at RBA Libros /Russian translation at NLO [Moscow] [2005] / Hungarian translation at Kijarat Kiado [Budapest] 2014]. 1.9 Modernizaçao dos Sentidos. Sao Paulo 1998 [Portuguese translation of publications [5.49], [5.67], [5.93], [5.97], [5.104], [5.105], [5.110], [5.117], [5.131], [5.137], [5.143], [5.147], [5.150]].
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Introduction the Empire at the End of Decadence the Social, Scientific
    1 Introduction The Empire at the End of Decadence The social, scientific and industrial revolutions of the later nineteenth century brought with them a ferment of new artistic visions. An emphasis on scientific determinism and the depiction of reality led to the aesthetic movement known as Naturalism, which allowed the human condition to be presented in detached, objective terms, often with a minimum of moral judgment. This in turn was counterbalanced by more metaphorical modes of expression such as Symbolism, Decadence, and Aestheticism, which flourished in both literature and the visual arts, and tended to exalt subjective individual experience at the expense of straightforward depictions of nature and reality. Dismay at the fast pace of social and technological innovation led many adherents of these less realistic movements to reject faith in the new beginnings proclaimed by the voices of progress, and instead focus in an almost perverse way on the imagery of degeneration, artificiality, and ruin. By the 1890s, the provocative, anti-traditionalist attitudes of those writers and artists who had come to be called Decadents, combined with their often bizarre personal habits, had inspired the name for an age that was fascinated by the contemplation of both sumptuousness and demise: the fin de siècle. These artistic and social visions of degeneration and death derived from a variety of inspirations. The pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who had envisioned human existence as a miserable round of unsatisfied needs and desires that might only be alleviated by the contemplation of works of art or the annihilation of the self, contributed much to fin-de-siècle consciousness.1 Another significant influence may be found in the numerous writers and artists whose works served to link the themes and imagery of Romanticism 2 with those of Symbolism and the fin-de-siècle evocations of Decadence, such as William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugène Delacroix, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert.
    [Show full text]
  • A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence by Hannah Arendt | the New York Review of Books
    A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence by Hannah Arendt | The New York Review of Books EMAIL Tweet Share A Special Supplement: Refections on Violence Hannah Arendt FEBRUARY 27, 1969 ISSUE I These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years, as seen against the background of the twentieth century. Indeed this century has become, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator. There is, however, another factor in the present situation which, though predicted by nobody, is of at least equal importance. The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. Hence, warfare—since times immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes—has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all of its glamor. “The apocalyptic” chess game between the superpowers, that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilization, is being played according to the rule: “if either ‘wins’ it is the end of both.”1 Moreover the game bears no resemblance to whatever war games preceded it. Its “rational” goal is mutual deterrence, not victory. Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution in technology, a revolution in tool-making, was especially marked in warfare. The very substance of violent action is ruled by the question of means and ends, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means, which it both justifies and needs.
    [Show full text]
  • The Term Stimmung Developed in German Aesthetics and Was Closely Connected with the Con- Cept of Harmony, Understood As an Epistemological Category
    70 winter 2016 – (Stimmung) – an aesthetic quality not yet defined within the context of poetics, emerging in the pro- cess of a cultural text’s reception, formed as a result Mood of objective and subjective factors in that process. The term Stimmung developed in German aesthetics and was closely connected with the con- cept of harmony, understood as an epistemological category. The first phase of the concept’s development came in the period of Sturm und Drang, when a way of overcoming the ratio- nalist paradigm then dominant in the study of cognition was sought. Even in the work of Immanuel Kant, however, we find a mention of the need to create proportional agreement between imagination and intellect (and thus emotional and rational perception) in order to achieve full cognition.1 Friedrich Schiller would later speak of mood in a similar spirit. Dawid Wellbery, in his Historical Dictionary of Basic Concepts of Aesthetics, quotes the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe referring to a sculpture by Falconet: “he likes to go inside a cobbler’s workshop or a stable, he likes to look at the face of his love, or at his boots, or at some antique ruins, because everywhere he feels sacred vibrations and hears the quiet tones through which nature connects everything with everything.”2 Accessible to artists, as indi- viduals of above-average sensitivity, mood thus constitutes an aesthetic quality that reveals itself as a harmonic unity shaped by a system of seemingly unrelated elements. The concept was developed by Friedrich Hölderlin, and several decades later by Friedrich Ni- etzsche, but in their considerations we see a significant narrowing of the scope of categories that can be called moods.
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism
    Chapter 2 Nietzsche’s Epistemic Perspectivism Steven D. Hales Abstract Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls per- spectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first- order epistemic theory. What’s original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche also offers a second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. Just as Descartes considers and rejects radical skepticism while at the same time adopting methodological skepticism, one could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. It is argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is in fact two-tiered: knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is, and in addition there is a methodological perspectivism in which distinct ways of knowing are utilized to produce understanding. A review of the manner in which understanding is conceptualized in contemporary epistemol- ogy and philosophy of science serves to illuminate how Nietzsche was tackling these ideas. Keywords Nietzsche · Perspectivism · Understanding · Knowledge 2.1 Introduction In this paper I will argue that Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and that those who interpret him as a sceptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls perspectivism. So far this is not a new take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in the Portable
    Notes Introduction 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), p. 549. 2. At the very end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Zarathustra asks, 'Am I concerned with happiness [Gliicke)?' and replies, 'I am concerned with my work [meinem Werke]', in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 439. Henceforth cited as Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for all and None', Sec. 1, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: The Modem Library, 1954), p. 894. Cited by Henry David Aiken, 'An Introduction to Zarathustra', in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), p. 114. 4. Gbermensch is usually translated as 'overman'; however, Mensch means 'human being' and so a better translation might be 'overbe­ ing' or 'overindividual'. Since 'overman' can be misleading and the other translations are unfamiliar I shall use the German Gbermensch untranslated. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 625. Henceforth cited as Nietzsche, The Antichrist. 6. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part, 'On the Afterworldly', p.143. 7. The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (London: Macmillan; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), chapter 2, pp. 91-133. 1 Abraham, the Knight of Faith 1. Seren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 244. Henceforth cited as Kierkegaard, Postscript. 2. Ibid., p. 186. 3.
    [Show full text]