Abstract

Aaron Ridley's The Deed Is Everything: Nietzsche on Will and Action uses the notion of expressivism to draw together several strands of Nietzschean thought into a view that both challenges and complements previous accounts of agency in general and previous secondary-literature accounts of Nietzsche's view of agency in particular. The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In this review, I briefly discuss each chapter with a particular focus on Ridley's distinction between the "letter" and the "spirit" of an action, a distinction that seems to me crucial to Ridley's conception of expressivism's advantages over other theories of agency. The "letter" of an action comprises the aspects of...