In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Die Frage nach einem neuen Materialismus hat gegenwärtig quer durch die Disziplinen Konjunktur. Dabei wird Materie oder 'Matter' nicht länger als passiver Träger von Bedeutung, Diskursen oder menschlicher Manipulation verstanden, sondern die Eigensinnigkeit und Kontingenz der materiellen Welt betont. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge, die die bislang massgeblich im englischsprachigen Raum und auf theoretischer Ebene stattfindende Debatte aufgreift und sie mit Blick auf ihr gesellschaftskritisches Potenzial diskutiert. Bei aller Diversität der disziplinären und thematischen Zugänge hebt der Band eine grundlegende Tendenz hervor. (...) Zum einen die Unzufriedenheit über die gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Zustände, zum anderen die Unfähigkeit gegenwärtiger Analysen, die aktuellen Bewegungen und Umbrüche in der Gesellschaft anschaulich zu machen. Die unterschiedlichen im Band vorgestellten Ansätze, Materie neu zu denken, nehmen diese Herausforderung an: Sie versuchen, soziale und politische Zusammenhänge in ihrer Komplexität zu erfassen ohne den kritischen Impetus des 'alten' marxistischen Materialismus aufzugeben. Dabei wird versucht, neomaterialistische Ansätze für unterschiedliche Bereiche der Gesellschaftskritik fruchtbar zu machen, darunter Ökonomiekritik, Biopolitik, Feminismus, Raumtheorie, Ästhetik, Technologie und kritische Theorie"--Back cover. (shrink)

This essay takes a transhistorical leap to connect the philosophy of Thomas Reid to the dramatic presentation of ethical choices in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Juxtaposing the two figures reveals an underlying moral ontology common to both. This shared ontology is remarkably nuanced, ultimately affirming moral liberty whilst decisively registering the fallibility of the ‘moral faculty.’ The final section asks whether the degree of comparability warrants any further speculation, revisiting the question of a ‘common humanity.’.

This study examines the relationships between a company''s emphasis on discretionary social responsibility, environment, and firm performance. It tests the proposition that environmental munificence and dynamism moderate the relationship between discretionary social responsibility and financial performance. Social responsibility was measured with a three-item scale in a sample of 62 firms using a questionnaire. Environmental munificence and dynamism were measured using archival sources as was financial performance (return on assets and return on sales). The results of moderated regression analyses and subgroup (...) analyses found a significant moderating effect of environment on the social responsibility-firm performance relationship. Discretionary social responsibility contributes to firm performance in environments that are dynamic and munificent. (shrink)

Belgian data from the PIDOP project show that boys are more involved than girls in illegal political actions, namely the production of graffiti and other acts of “incivility”. These activities must be considered in both groups as complementary to conventional political and social participation and not as their opposite. The main explanatory factor is the level of the perceived efficaciousness of such actions. The lack of trust in institutions and the level of awareness of societal discrimination play no significant explanatory (...) role. In males, the involvement level in these activities depends on feelings of personal discrimination and on the lack of freedom concerning individual choice, confirming the theory of societal vulnerability and Honneth’s theory of recognition. This level also increases along with increasing opportunities to make acquaintances and have fun in the neighbourhood. In females, this involvement is explained by the distance with regard to pro-sociality level. (shrink)

Abstract: Groundwork is lain for answering questions as to how to situate Husserl’s theory of functions in relation to Frege’s. I examine Husserl’s ideas about analyticity and mathematics, logic and mathematics, formalization, calculating with concepts and propositions, the foundations of arithmetic, extensions to show that, although he knew, studied and lauded Frege’s ideas about functions and concepts, each man approached the issues from different angles. Seduced by the siren of transcendental phenomenology Husserl did not pursue the issues, implications, and consequences (...) of his ideas about functions. I ask whether so doing could provide new insight into, or even solutions to, the problems involving functions that beset Frege, Russell and have beset their successors. (shrink)

This chapter uses Marx’s credit theory in Comments on James Mill and Freire’s theory of the banking model of education from Pedagogy of the Oppressed to argue that the confluence of massive student debt and structures of “banking” pedagogy in contemporary American higher education places many university students in a unique position of dehumanization. The material limitations brought about by the loan are compounded by the social limitations of a resulting push toward productivity in education. Students with loan debt are (...) driven in the direction of business and pre-professional majors and away from the humanities and other fields which would facilitate students’ abilities to critically question the dehumanizing aspects of their situation. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl was one of the very first to experience the direct impact of challenging problems in set theory and his phenomenology first began to take shape while he was struggling to solve such problems. Here I study three difficulties associated with Frege's use of sets that Husserl explicitly addressed: reference to non-existent, impossible, imaginary objects; the introduction of extensions; and 'Russell's paradox'.I do so within the context of Husserl's struggle to overcome the shortcomings of set theory and to develop (...) his own theory of manifolds. I define certain issues involved and discuss how Husserl's theory of manifolds might confront them. In so doing I hope to help bring Husserl's theories about sets and manifolds out of the realm of abstract theorizing and prompt further exploration of uncharted philosophical territory rich in philosophical implications. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s interest in tragedy continues throughout his work. And yet scholarship on Nietzsche’s account of tragedy has focused almost exclusively on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy – a work which is in many ways discontinuous with his more mature philosophical views. In this paper, I aim to illuminate Nietzsche’s post-Birth of Tragedy views on tragedy by setting them in the context of a particular historical conversation. Ever since Plato banished the tragic poets from the kallipolis, various philosophers have (...) attempted to respond to his challenge to offer a ‘defense of poetry’. What Nietzsche offers, I argue, is a distinctive form of response to Plato’s challenge. I show how Nietzsche takes seriously Plato’s worries, and even ends up in partial agreement with him: tragedy is not (unqualifiedly) valuable; it can be spiritually dangerous. Key to Nietzsche’s account is a distinction he draws between two types of tragic audience. For the ‘lower types’, tragedy is – as Plato feared – dangerous. For the ‘higher types’, however, tragedy can act as a regenerative force. Finally, I discuss a distinctive form of value that tragedy makes available to a modern audience: tragedy can act as a stimulus towards the process of the revaluation of values. (shrink)

Although the Ca2+‐dependent proteinase (calpain) system has been found in every vertebrate cell that has been examined for its presence and has been detected in Drosophila and parasites, the physiological function(s) of this system remains unclear. Calpain activity has been associated with cleavages that alter regulation of various enzyme activities, with remodeling or disassembly of the cell cytoskeleton, and with cleavages of hormone receptors. The mechanism regulating activity of the calpain system in vivo also is unknown. It has been proposed (...) that binding of the calpains to phospholipid in a cell membrane lowers the Ca2+ concentration, [Ca2+], required for the calpains to autolyze, and that autolysis converts an inactive proenzyme into an active protease. Recent studies, however, show that the calpains bind to specific proteins and not to phospholipids, and that binding to cell membranes does not affect the [Ca2+] required for autolysis. It seems likely that calpain activity is regulated by binding of Ca2+ to specific sites on the calpain molecule, with binding to each site eliciting a response (proteolytic activity, calpastatin binding, etc.) specific for that site. Regulation must also involve an, as yet, undiscovered mechanism that increases the affinity of the Ca2+‐binding sites for Ca2+. (shrink)

To know Him is to love Him -- God as our personal father -- The unfolding revelation of God -- God's amazing attributes -- The Messiah has come! -- Wonderful Messiah, son of God -- The person of the Holy Spirit -- Holy Spirit, you are welcome here! -- Knowing God by knowing His word -- Knowing the master builder -- God's trustworthy word -- Hungry for his every word -- The uniqueness of God's word -- Getting to know God.

Husserl and Cantor were colleagues and close friends during the last 14 years of the nineteenth century, when Cantor was at the height of his creative powers and Husserl in the throes of an intellectual struggle during which he drew apart from people and writings to whom he owed most of his intellectual training and drew closer to the ideas of thinkers whose writings he had not been able to evaluate properly and had consulted too little. I study ways in (...) which Husserl and Cantor might be said to have been alike, while pointing to dissimilarities between them. In particular, I discuss how their ideas overlapped and crisscrossed with regard to mathematics and philosophy, Platonic idealism, abstraction, empiricism, psychologism, actual consciousness and pure logic, Frege’s reviews of their works, metaphysics and mysticism, sets, arithmetization, strange and imaginary numbers and manifolds. I conclude that Cantor was among those of his mentors from whose ideas Husserl drew away and Lotze and Bolzano were among those to whose ideas he drew closer. (shrink)

L'actuel regain d'intérêt pour la philosophie témoigne de l'attente la plus légitime qui soit, eu égard aux prétentions traditionnelles et à l'aura de cette discipline, mais également la plus difficile à satisfaire : qu'elle mène celui qui épouse ses chemins à une véritable réappropriation de sa propre existence, à une recréation personnelle. Impossible ici de se satisfaire d'un horizon de consolations aimables et de recettes de prospérité, non plus que de vertiges théorisants ou d'érudition monomaniaque. Face à un monde qui (...) semble avoir d'avance consumé nos élans et consommé nos révoltes, les postures et commodités ne sont plus de mise. Un retour d'authenticité s'impose à l'engagement philosophique lui-même. En fait, la mise à l'épreuve de soi est passage obligé, dès lors que de mort de Dieu en chute des idoles de remplacement, nul ne peut plus prétendre faire surgir la valeur irréductible de l'humain d'ailleurs que de l'homme... D'où la pertinence et l'attrait de l'exploration, ici proposée, des voies traditionnelles et ressorts nouveaux d'une maïeutique propre à faire naître l'homme à lui-même, à travers la mise à nu et le retrait de tous les masques que nous imposent la vie en société et le respect de ses codes. Poussant au déracinement du moi comme à une étape nécessaire au dévoilement de notre vérité, les auteurs de cet essai s'inscrivent dans la lointaine filiation de ces philosophes de l'Antiquité (Stoïciens, Cyniques) qui vivaient leur philosophie comme un travail sur soi, voire une ascèse, et dans le prolongement de tout ce pan de la pensée contemporaine qui, avec Foucault notamment, s'est employé à armer la philosophie d'un pouvoir maximal de transformation croisée de celui qui s'y adonne et du social qui l'environne. (shrink)

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and (...) deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern. Offering the first examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, _The Autonomous Animal _analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. Claire E. Rasmussen begins by (...) considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then focusing on specific examples of political behavior that allow her to interrogate these theories. She demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. She points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, Rasmussen also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Reading Nietzsche’s many remarks on freedom and free will, we face a dilemma. On the one hand, Nietzsche levels vehement attacks against the idea of the freedom of the will in several places throughout his writing. On the other hand, he frequently describes the sorts of people he admires as ‘free’ in various respects, as ‘free spirits’, or as in possession of a ‘free will’. So does Nietzsche think that we are or perhaps could be free, or not? I argue (...) that we ought to read these seemingly conflicting claims as part of one unified project, which is to try to understand what true freedom would look like. Nietzsche’s attacks on ‘free will’, I suggest, are not intended to establish that we are not free, but rather to show that a certain tempting picture of freedom is confused and totally inadequate for purpose. The positive half of Nietzsche’s project, then, should be read as his attempt to do a better job – to provide an account of freedom that better articulates what we were trying, via the confused picture, to get at. (shrink)

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance (...) to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world’s languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child‐directed speech in English found that suffixes were more (...) accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant (...) or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the notion of ‘academic identity’ holistically, seeking to bring together the teacher and researcher roles of academics in the neoliberal university. The article begins from the perspective of early-career academics who occupy the majority of fixed-term, teaching-only contracts in Higher Education, arguing that such casualisation of academic labour entrenches the role of the academic asHomo economicus. Drawing on the work of Foucault, I demonstrate how a neoliberal governmentality is now not only exerted upon academics (...) from without, but increasingly they are subjecting themselves to the logic of efficiency and effectiveness too. The neoliberal governmentality of the university thus influences and shapes academic subjectivities, such that what it means tobean academic is confined to this marketised logic. Despite the pressures placed on academics to ‘produce’ measurable outputs and demonstrate their impact, I argue that moving beyondHomo economicusis possible, arguing instead for a re-claiming of ‘the academic’ asHomo academicus. The idea ofHomo academicuscan only be supported when three conditions are present: collegiality is afforded greater importance than competition; the discourses of ‘productivity’ and performativity are balanced against simply ‘doing good work well’ (Pirrie in Virtue and the quiet art of scholarship, Routledge, London, 2019), and; academics are mindful to practice the ‘quieter’ intellectual virtues, including the virtue of ‘unknowing’ (Smith in J Philos Educ 50:272–284, 2016). (shrink)

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

Most people encounter art images as digital reproductions on a computer screen instead of as originals in a museum or gallery. With the development of digital technologies, high-resolution artworks can be accessed anywhere and anytime by a large number of viewers. Since these digital images depict the same content and are attributed to the same artist as the original, it is often implicitly assumed that their aesthetic evaluation will be similar. When it comes to the digital reproductions of art, however, (...) it is also obvious that reproductions do differ from the originals in various aspects. Besides image quality, resolution, and format, the most obvious change is in the representation of color. The effects of subjectively varying surface-level image features on art evaluation have not been clearly assessed. To address this gap, we compare the evaluation of digital reproductions of 16 expressionist and impressionist paintings manipulated to have a high color saturation vs. a saturation similar to the original. We also investigate the impact of viewing time and expertise, two other aspects that may impact the perception of art in online contexts. Moreover, we link these dimensions to a recent model of aesthetic experience [the Vienna Integrated Model of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes in Art Perception ]. Results suggest that color saturation does not exert a major influence on liking. Cognitive and emotional aspects, however, are affected – to different extents for experts and laypersons. For laypersons, the increase in color saturation led to more positive assessments of an artwork, whereas it resulted in increased confusion for art experts. This insight is particularly important when it comes to reproducing artworks digitally. Depending on the intended use, increasing or decreasing the color saturation of the digitally reproduced image might be most appropriate. We conclude with a discussion of these findings and address the question of why empirical aesthetics requires more precise dimensions to better understand the subtle processes that take place in the perception of today’s digitally reproduced art environment. (shrink)

Nonetheless, psychoanalytic feminist theory can offer a new interpretive strategy for deconstructing her equally famous opposition between the social and the ...

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own (...) bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology by Mattia RiccardiClaire KirwinMattia Riccardi, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi + 249 pp. isbn: 9780198803287. Hardcover, $70.00.Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher. Indeed, it is probably fair to say, as many commentators have, that he was an anti-systematic philosopher. It is harder to say what this means, and harder still to know how to deal with it when we aim to (...) interpret his philosophy. For we wish to attribute to Nietzsche certain claims and positions, perhaps even arguments, and in doing so we generally prefer that these not contradict each other. And so as we attempt to understand “Nietzsche’s philosophy” as a coherent entity, we tend to find ourselves—for better or worse—heading down the path of systematizing that philosophy.Mattia Riccardi’s Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology is an impressive example of such a systematizing reading of Nietzsche. In developing his account of Nietzsche’s (mature) philosophy of mind, Riccardi acknowledges that Nietzsche’s own approach to this topic is “scattered” and “piecemeal” (5). What Riccardi aims to offer is a comprehensive reconstruction of the systematic account that Nietzsche, for whatever reason, did not explicitly give us. And what we are presented with here is a very systematic Nietzsche, one who offers a comprehensive and detailed account of the inner workings of the mind in terms of drives and affects and their relation (this is the topic of the book’s Part I, “Beneath the Surface”); consciousness—three different types of consciousness, to be precise—and the sense in which it is epiphenomenal (in Part II, “Mapping the Surface”); and the nature of the self, the possibility of self-knowledge, the nature of the will, and the relevance of all of this for the Nietzschean “ideal type” of human being (in Part III, “The Upshot”). [End Page 203]We might worry that such a systematic philosopher is no longer quite recognizable as Nietzsche—that in doing such comprehensive and systematic reconstructive work one is somehow leaving behind the Nietzsche who wrote not treatises but rather aphorisms, polemics, pseudo-biblical texts, and poetry. But Riccardi is upfront that what he is doing is reconstructive work of this kind and meticulous in showing how the positions he develops can plausibly be attributed to Nietzsche—or at the very least, that such positions can be constructed out of genuinely Nietzschean building blocks. These positions are fleshed out and given contemporary relevance through discussion of their relation to modern accounts of mindedness (the higher-order thought theory of consciousness, for example, a version of which—carefully modified—Riccardi attributes to Nietzsche), but at the same time Nietzsche’s thought is throughout set carefully within the relevant historical and biographical contexts. The seeds and impetus for Nietzsche’s ideas are located in authors he was known to have read (Schopenhauer, Leibniz, and Stendhal, of course, but also Schneider, Mayer, Fouillée, Espinas, and more). The development of these ideas over time is then traced through Nietzsche’s notes and published work. At each point, alternative readings of these texts that have been proposed in the secondary literature are considered and carefully, persuasively, refuted. For philosophers seeking to offer a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche’s thought on some topic, this sort of approach should be seen as the gold standard. And for anyone interested in understanding what Nietzsche has to say about human psychology, this book will be essential reading.Riccardi’s Nietzsche offers us a serious and detailed philosophy of mind. It seems appropriate, then, to respond to it as such. Rather than giving a précis of each chapter, or debating the exegetical accuracy of the account, I shall instead offer some critical engagement with the detail of the account itself. I will focus on two key components of the system Riccardi elaborates: first, the account of reflective consciousness and, second, the sense in which he takes that form of consciousness to be epiphenomenal. These parts of the system, the topics of chapters 5 and 7, respectively, play crucial roles within the architecture of the book as a whole. For taken together, they show just how radically... (shrink)