The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and (...) inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis. (shrink)

This English translation—the first since 1909—restores Human, All Too Human to its proper central position in the Nietzsche canon. First published in 1878, the book marks the philosophical coming of age of Friedrich Nietzsche. In it he rejects the romanticism of his early work, influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, and looks to enlightened reason and science. The "Free Spirit" enters, untrammeled by all accepted conventions, a precursor of Zarathustra. The result is 638 stunning aphorisms about everything under and (...) above the sun. (shrink)

But of all evil results due to the last contest with France the most deplorable peihaps is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly that German culture was also victorious in the struggle and that it should now therefore be decked with garlands as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes.

This remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms was originally published in three instalments. The first (now Volume I) appeared in 1878, just before Nietzsche abandoned academic life, with a first supplement entitled The Assorted Opinions and Maxims following in 1879, and a second entitled The Wanderer and his Shadow a year later. In 1886 Nietzsche republished them together in a two-volume edition, with new prefaces to each volume. Both volumes are presented here in R. J. Hollingdale's distinguished translation (originally published (...) in the series Cambridge Texts in German Philosophy) with a new introduction by Richard Schacht. In this wide-ranging work Nietzsche first employed his celebrated aphoristic style, so perfectly suited to his iconoclastic, penetrating and multi-faceted thought. Many themes of his later work make their initial appearance here, expressed with unforgettable liveliness and subtlety. Human, All Too Human well deserves its subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits', and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here found a new champion. (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the (...) descriptions of the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)

This volume is the first of two to provide a new edition of Human, All Too Human, the earliest of Nietzsche's works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. Published in 1878, it marked both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche's own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture. It presents the precursors of the ideas that would later become Nietzsche's theories on genealogy and of the U;bermensch. This new (...) translation presents Nietzsche's text in the straightforward, direct prose of the original. It is the first English edition to include the significant variants and revisions of the original published text, and the first to provide cross-references to the forthcoming volume of Nietzsche's notebook material from the same period. It includes explanatory notes and a translator's afterword detailing the history of the work. (shrink)

This paper compares clinical intuition and phenomenological intuition. I begin with a brief analysis of Husserl’s conception of intuition. Second, I review the attitude toward clinical intuition by physicians and philosophers. Third, I discuss the Aristotelian conception of intellectual intuition or nous and its relation to phronesis. Phronesis provides a philosophical ground for clinical intuition by linking medicine as both a techné and praxis. Considering medicine as a techné, Pellegrino and Thomasma exclude clinical intuitions from their philosophy of medicine. However, (...) in modeling clinical reasoning on phronesis, they link Aristotelian nous with clinical reasoning. While supporting the application of phronesis to clinical reasoning, I consider Pellegrino and Thomasma’s model deficient for eliminating intuition as an inalienable element of clinical reasoning. Rather, clinical intuitions are necessary in linking medicine as both art and practice. This becomes more obvious through the phenomenological analysis of clinical intuitions. Clinical reasoning and phenomenological intuitions are similar in joining the perceptual and intellectual aspects of human judgment. Furthermore, clinical intuitions can be extended to become phenomenological intuitions through phenomenological reflection. Clinical intuitions may be examined phenomenologically for their originary foundations. In this way, medicine acts as a phenomenological clue. Phenomenology provides a method to restore the Hippocratic synthesis of empirical observation and wholism associated with clinical intuitions. (shrink)

This remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms was originally published in three instalments. The first appeared in 1878, just before Nietzsche abandoned academic life, with a first supplement entitled The Assorted Opinions and Maxims following in 1879, and a second entitled The Wanderer and his Shadow a year later. In 1886 Nietzsche republished them together in a two-volume edition, with new prefaces to each volume. Both volumes are presented here in R. J. Hollingdale's distinguished translation with a new introduction by (...) Richard Schacht. In this wide-ranging work Nietzsche first employed his celebrated aphoristic style, so perfectly suited to his iconoclastic, penetrating and multi-faceted thought. Many themes of his later work make their initial appearance here, expressed with unforgettable liveliness and subtlety. Human, All Too Human well deserves its subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits', and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here found a new champion. (shrink)

Can taxation and the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state be conceived as a modern system of circulation of the gift? But once such a gift is institutionalized, regulated and sanctioned through legal mechanisms, does it not risk being perverted or corrupted, and/or not leaving room for genuinely altruistic motives? What is more: if the market’s utilitarian logic can corrupt or ‘crowd out’ altruistic feelings or motivations, what makes us think that the welfare state cannot also be a source (...) of corruption? To explain the standard answers to the abovementioned questions as well as their implications I will first re-examine two opposing positions assumed here as paradigmatic examples of other similar positions: on the one hand, Titmuss’s work and the never-ending debate about it; on the other, Godbout’s position, in-so-far as it shows how Titmuss’s arguments can easily be turned upside down. I will then introduce and reinterpret Einaudi’s “critical point” theory as a more complex and richer anthropological explanation of the problems and answers considered herein. Through the analysis of these paradigmatic positions I will develop two interrelated arguments. 1) The way these problems are posed as well as the standard answers to them are: a) subject to fallacies: the dichotomy fallacy and the fallacy of composition; b) too reductive and simplistic: we should at least try to clarify what kind of ‘gift’ or ‘corruption’ we are thinking about, and who or what the ‘giver’, the ‘corrupter’, the ‘receiver’ and/or the ‘corrupted’ party are. 2) The answers to these problems cannot be found by merely following a theoretical approach, nor can they be merely based on empirical evidence; instead, they need to take into account the forever troublesome, ambiguous and unpredictable matter of human freedom. (shrink)

This is the second volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche’s work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last quarter century. The original Italian edition was simultaneously (...) published in French, German, and Japanese. This volume of Human, All Too Human, the first of two parts, is the earliest of Nietzsche’s works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. In this work Nietzsche began to establish the intellectual difference from his own cultural milieu and time that makes him our contemporary. Published in 1878, it marks both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche’s own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture typified by Wagnerian opera. (shrink)

This is the second volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche’s work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last quarter century. The original Italian edition was simultaneously (...) published in French, German, and Japanese. This volume of Human, All Too Human, the first of two parts, is the earliest of Nietzsche’s works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. In this work Nietzsche began to establish the intellectual difference from his own cultural milieu and time that makes him our contemporary. Published in 1878, it marks both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche’s own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture typified by Wagnerian opera. (shrink)

Volume 4 of _The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche_ contains two works, _Mixed Opinions and Maxims_ and _The Wanderer and His Shadow_, originally published separately, then republished together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's works. They mingle aphorisms drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Like its predecessor, _Human, All Too Human II_ is above all an act of resistance not only to the intellectual influences that Nietzsche felt called upon (...) to critique, but to the basic physical facts of his daily life. It turns an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns—metaphysics, morality, religion, art, style, society, politics and culture. The notebook entries included here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist. (shrink)

"Offers dazzling observations of human psychology, social interaction, esthetics and religion."-- New York Times Book Review Accessible, much-studied work by one of philosophy's most important figures Nietzsche's remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms exhibits many of the themes of his later work, making this volume essential to an understanding of his philosophy. Written with the author's characteristic iconoclastic wit, it constitutes a lively and passionate inquiry into conventional wisdom.

Originally published as separate volumes as Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) andThe Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), the two works included here continue the aphoristic style begun in Volume I of Nietzsche's "Book for Free Spirits" and offer a window into the intellectual sources behind his evolution as a philosopher.

This paper presents an overview of the risks and benefits of Social AI, understood as conversational AI systems that cater to human social needs like romance, companionship, or entertainment. Section 1 of the paper provides a brief history of conversational AI systems and introduces conceptual distinctions to help distinguish varieties of Social AI and pathways to their deployment. Section 2 of the paper adds further context via a brief discussion of anthropomorphism and its relevance to assessment of human-chatbot (...) relationships. Section 3 of the paper provides a survey of potential and in some cases demonstrated harms associated with user interactions with Social AI systems. Finally, Section 4 discusses how the benefits and harms of Social AI can best be addressed, with a primary focus on how frameworks from AI ethics can inform their development. (shrink)

This article looks at Donna Haraway’s work in the light of Continental philosophy, and especially post-structuralism, and examines both the post-humanist and the post-anthropocentric aspects of her thought. The article argues that the great contribution of Haraway’s work is the re-grounding of the subject in material practice. This neo-foundationalist approach is combined, however, with a firm commitment to a process ontology that looks at subjectivity as a complex and open-ended set of relations. The article argues for the centrality of the (...) notion of relationality in Haraway’s thought, and in this respect her work can be compared to Deleuze’s rhizomic thinking. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the relation to other species in comparison with Deleuze’s notion of becoming-animal. (shrink)

On reading “Algorithms for Ethical Decision-Making in the Clinical: A Proof of Concept,” I imagined that for some the fundamental problem with the authors' approach is the very...

Full-length studies of individual books of Nietzsche have been lacking until now both because of the immaturity of the field and because Nietzsche's style itself seems to contraindicate them. Close reading, however, reveals a great deal of literary and philosophical unity. This holds good even of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche's longest and most unwieldy work. The book represents Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as the birth of Nietzsche as we know him in the later works. The (...) book's embrace of science as conducive to culture follows the early works' vilification of science as anathema to culture. This reassessment is possible because science is now seen as a method and a discipline rather than an insatiable drive for knowledge, and culture is now a broad set of symbols and activities rather than a narrowly focussed "unity of artistic style." Both changes were motivated by Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner. Part of the help science provides culture is its release from restrictive metaphysical beliefs. Nietzsche battles metaphysics, principally that of Schopenhauer, by means of scientific arguments meant both to provide alternative explanations of phenomena and to expose the origin of countervailing metaphysical beliefs. However, even when combined in a two-pronged attack, these arguments still fall short of their goal of refuting metaphysics. The scientific world-view may nonetheless aid the development of "free spirits," whose unalloyed devotion to knowledge makes them science's paragons. The free spirits are the prototypes for the later works' strong individuals, yet here they are viewed as crucial elements in the cultural development of general society. Nietzsche seeks both to create them and to encourage their devotion to the needs of culture. Part of his effort to do this is the deployment of a terse, elliptical style which will involve the reader more thoroughly than can be done by means of argument alone. Study of the book's structure reveals that its core, Parts 1, 5, and 9, outlines the relation between science, culture, and free spirits. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to trace the transformations in Nietzsche's early thinking that led to the ideas published in Human, All Too Human, the first book of his mature philosophy. In contrast to his early works, in which he sides with art and philosophy in criticizing the scientific culture of his time, Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, hails the methodology of science as a way to overcome the metaphysical delusions of philosophy, art, and (...) religion. However, in disagreement with popular scholarly view, I show that Human, All Too Human does not represent a complete break with his earlier writings, but rather a shift in emphasis. I argue that the overall project connecting Nietzsche's early thought to Human, All Too Human is, first, the attempt to come to terms with the upheavals introduced into the cultural terrain by the Socratic turn, and second, to affirm a higher culture. (shrink)

The paper explores Nietzsche's observations on language in Human, All Too Human I, 11; reflects on the anti-realist position that Nietzsche defends in that aphorism; and focuses on the role she plays in his later investigation on Western culture and its anthropology. As will be argued, Nietzsche's criticism towards common sense realism is consistent with some pragmatist epistemologies developed during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. This treat of " timeliness " does not limit Nietzsche's originality on the topic. (...) In fact, the idea that philosophy can contrast the metaphysical commitment of common sense can be seen as the theoretical tool that allows Nietzsche to operate on the development of European culture and society. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne’s "Tristram Shandy" and shows Sterne’s deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant’s underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer’s more (...) complete account and identifies humor’s place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz’s work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but also to its style. The book concludes with an explication of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s claim that laughter is a response to mechanical inelasticity. (shrink)

The issue of how we ought to treat the nonhuman animals in our lives is one that has been growing in importance over the past forty years. A common charge is that discriminatory behavior based only on differences of species membership is just as wrong morally as are acts of racism or sexism. Is such a charge sustainable? It is argued that such reasoning confuses real differences with false ones, may have negative ethical consequences, and could tempt us to abandon (...) our responsibilities to the natural world. Finally, some benefits to human animal treatment that more humane nonhuman animal treatment may bring are considered. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a certain understanding of “animality” – or that a certain problematization of the traditional human-animal hierarchy and divide – is central to Nietzsche’s account of the good life. Nietzsche’s philosophical project is primarily directed against those “metaphysical oppositions of values” that traditionally structure how we think, feel and live, and in this paper I submit that, for Nietzsche, the classical opposition between the human and the animal is the most basic and the (...) most pernicious, for it undergirds the oppositional hierarchy between rationality and irrationality that has turned human life against itself. I draw primarily from Nietzsche’s second “Untimely Meditation” and from a passage from Daybreak in order to make the case that, for Nietzsche, we must reject any facile ontological opposition between human beings and non-human animals and that we must recognize and live in consonance with the “animal” conditions of our existence: human beings must recuperate and reintegrate rather than suppress their “animality” in order to thrive. For Nietzsche, we can say that virtue is a certain cultivated balance between our “humanity” and our “animality.”. (shrink)

Nietzsche often appears, especially in his writings from the middle period, to endorse psychological egoism, namely the claim that all actions are motivated by, and are for the sake of, the agent’s own self-interest. I argue that Nietzsche’s position in Human, All Too Human should not be so understood. Rather, he is claiming, more weakly and more plausibly, that no action is entirely unegoistic, entirely free of egoistic motivations. Thus some actions might be motivated both by egoistic and (...) unegoistic motives, on his view. Nietzsche’s argument may, in other words, be understood to be directed specifically against Schopenhauer’s portrayal of moral motivation, as pure, entirely unalloyed altruism, to show that this sort of action is impossible, not to rule out the possibility of any altruistic motive whatsoever. In light of Schopenahuer’s moral psychology, to which Nietzsche to some extent adhered at that time, I develop a concept of motivation and reconstruct Nietzsche’s argument. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Against the impression that what he says about socialism is either indiscriminately hostile or somewhat superficial, I show Nietzsche to be a subtle and nuanced judge of socialism in his first three “middle period” works—Human, All Too Human, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, and The Wanderer and His Shadow. First, I argue that the critique of socialism contained within the two volumes of HH cuts deeper than generic dismissals of socialism found in later work. Second, I contend that (...) Nietzsche's critique of socialism is not his final word, but comes with an equally pointed critique of the “property-minded.” Third, I demonstrate that although Nietzsche diagnoses both pro-socialists and anti-socialists as driven by factionalism, he is not committed to a position of neutrality. Finally, I examine his claim that when economic equalities grow extreme, determinedly socialist policies merit strong support, and argue for the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche's thinking about socialism. (shrink)

This is another volume in the first English-language translation of the Colli/Montinari German edition of Nietzsche's complete works. This volume contains notebook fragments, written while Nietzsche was working on Human, All Too Human I.

Book I of HH would seem to announce the end of Nietzsche's concern with the philosophical pessimism that shapes BT and figures prominently in HL. In BT he endorses the pessimistic thesis that the best thing for a human being is to die soon, while he announces in HH that the even the words "optimism" and "pessimism" are outdated since they play a role in a theological discourse that is gradually dying out. This change is connected with another, namely (...) Nietzsche's growing intolerance of metaphysical speculation of any sort. In place of the wild metaphysics of BT, which postulates Apollinian and Dionysian drives as ultimate constituents of reality and associates the latter with a primal... (shrink)

"Twilight of the Idols" plays an important role in Nietzsche’s work, since it represents the opening writing of the philosophical project called "Transvaluation of all values". In that text, Nietzsche aims to sound out the "eternal idols", which means to disclose the inconsistency of the principles of traditional metaphysics. The way Nietzsche addresses the "old truths" in Twilight of the Idols leads back to his early writings, when his theory of knowledge is first outlined, inspired by Schopenhauer as much as (...) neo- and post-Kantian thinkers such as F. Lange and A. Spir. As I shall show, these observations can be compared with Ernst Mach's anti-metaphisical attitude to the ordinary world-conception, insofar as Mach as much as Nietzsche stressed the importance of a historical approach as instrument to enlighten the "prejudices" of traditional scientists or philosophers. (shrink)

Feuerbach is known for his unmasking of the concept of God insofar he solved it in a celestial idealization of the human essence. Xenophanes already rejected the popular idea of the gods, which were described as deified human beings. Our purpose is to compare the process both thinkers followed, because both set the human as the focus of their arguments. Xenophanes’ divinity retained some aspect in common with humans and such a God, despite his diversity from men (...) and his transcendence, is human enough, so that he cannot be taken as a rival of man. Ultimately, one should point out how Christianity fits into this humanistic line of understanding of God and His relationship with man. (shrink)

J. Christopher Maloney argues that free will is compatible with necessary laws of science and immutable history. For free will emerges from an akratic will that asymptotically approaches the ability to choose to act otherwise than it willfully does.