In Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals": A Reader's Guide, Daniel Conway explains the philosophical background against which the book was written, the wider context of Western morality in general and the key themes and topics inherent ...

In this study Daniel Conway shows how Nietzsche's political thinking bears a closer resemblance to the conservative republicanism of his predecessors than to the progressive liberalism of his contemporaries. The key contemporary figures such as Habermas, Foucault, McIntyre, Rorty and Rawls are also examined in the light of Nietzsche's political legacy. _Nietzsche and the Political___ also draws out important implications for contemporary liberalism and feminist thought, above all showing Nietzsche's continuing relevance to the shape of political thinking today.

This 1997 work is a book-length treatment of the unique nature and development of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustran political philosophy. This later political philosophy is set in the context of the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in the years 1885–1888, in such texts as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. In this light Nietzsche's own diagnosis of the ills of modernity is subject to the same (...) criticism that he himself levelled against previous philosophies; that it is an involuntary symptom of the age it represents. Nietzsche is seen to be aware of his own decadence and of his complicity with the very tendencies that he dissects and deplores. By relating the political philosophy, the critique of modernity and the theory of decadence Daniel Conway has written a powerful book about Nietzsche's own appreciation of the limitations of both his writing style and of his famous prophetic 'stance'. (shrink)

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of a week-long philosophy summer camp on middle and high school-age youth with specific attention paid to the development of intellectual humility in the campers. In June 2016 a university in Texas hosted its first philosophy summer camp for youth who had just completed sixth through twelfth grades. Basing our camp on the pedagogical model of the Philosophy for Children program, our aim was specifically to develop a community of inquiry among the campers, providing them (...) with a safe intellectual space to be introduced to philosophy and philosophical discussion. In 2017 we launched a formal longitudinal study to determine what impact a week-long philosophy summer camp would have on teens and tweens. Examining quantitative and qualitative data collected from 2016–2020, we found that the camp has had a significant impact on the teenagers who have attended. In particular, we found that intellectual humility increased over the duration of their camp experience and that this increase correlates with an increased affinity for philosophy and philosophical discussion. (shrink)

The title of Nietzsche's autobiography, Ecce Homo, repeats (and echoes) the famous di-rective issued by Pilate, the provincial governor of Judea, to the crowd assembled outside the pretorium. While we know, more or less, what Pilate intended the crowd to behold—viz. the unremarkable humanity of the innocent prisoner Jesus—it is not entirely clear what Nietzsche expects his readers to behold in his autobiography. Despite imploring his read-ers not to mistake him for another, Nietzsche presents himself in Ecce Homo as nearly (...) indistinguishable from the "moralists" whom he identifies as the targets of his criticism. The key to understanding how "one becomes what one is" lies in Nietzsche's understanding that both he and Jesus have improbably emerged in excess of the disciplinary regimes that formed them. The defiance displayed by Jesus at John 19:5 thus alerts us to the corre-sponding emergence of Nietzsche—as the "first immoralist"—from the morality he has outgrown. (shrink)

Written by an international team of contributors, this book offers a fresh set of interpretations of Fear and Trembling, which remains Kierkegaard's most influential and popular book. The chapters provide incisive accounts of the psychological and epistemological presuppositions of Fear and Trembling; of religious experience and the existential dimension of faith; of Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge; of the purported and real conflicts between ethics and religion; of Kierkegaard's interpretation of the value of hope, trust, love (...) and other virtues; of Kierkegaard's debts to German idealism and Protestant theology; and of his seminal contributions to the fields of psychology, existential phenomenology and literary theory. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of Kierkegaard studies, the history of philosophy, theology and religious studies. (shrink)

In addition to his more familiar philosophical and theological pursuits, Kierkegaard engaged in a sustained confrontation with late modern European culture, which he diagnosed as decadent and spiritually impoverished. In support of this critical engagement, he developed two distinct approaches: in his pseudonymous authorship, he and his pseudonyms presented the ethical sphere of existence as wounded, yet potentially reparable. In A Literary Review, by way of contrast, Kierkegaard pronounced the wounded ethical sphere ruined beyond repair. As he explained, representatives of (...) the “present age” will have no choice but to proliferate their besetting decadence until all is “leveled.” At such a point, however, he nevertheless proposed to find redemption in the decay of late modern European culture, most notably in the exemplary suffering of the “unrecognizable one” who indirectly defeats “leveling” and thereby serves unknown others. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Life as Will to Power Nietzsche contra “English Darwinism” Life as Self‐Overcoming The Case of Nietzsche The Law of Life Concluding Critical Remarks.

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

Long before the viewers of Ridley Scott's Alien catch their first, fleeting glimpse of the terrifying alien, they have already made the acquaintance of the alienated human beings aboard the USCSS Nostromo. The plot of Ridley Scott's Alien is well known to science fiction buffs and film enthusiasts more generally. In fact, the human members of the crew of the Nostromo exhibit “alienation”, a condition identified by Karl Marx in the “Estranged Labor” section of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of (...) 1844. So long as the capitalist mode of production remains viable and authoritative, Marx insists, workers will suffer the indignities associated with alienated labor. In the transition from Alien to Aliens, the added s makes a huge difference. Alienated from their (admittedly clueless) leadership, their cloudy mission objectives, and one another, and overly dependent on their military hardware, the Colonial Marines are no match for the coordinated attack of the alien species. (shrink)

Despite his attack on metaphysical speculation, Nietzsche is generally received as a closet realist who identifies objective reality with a primordial chaos. By portraying Nietzsche as a metaphysical realist, this standard interpretation attributes to him the privileged "God's eye point of view" that his perspectivism discredits. Some readers attempt to salvage Nietzsche from the scrap heap of realism by presenting perspectivism as continuous with some strain of antirealism. But these attempts often ignore Nietzsche's apparent embrace of the categories and vocabulary (...) of realism. I argue that Nietzsche is perhaps best described as an antirealist who appreciates the pragmatic advantages of realism. (shrink)

This essay situates Jon Stewart’s Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World and Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in the genre of philo­sophical anthropology, wherein corresponding conceptions of the human and the divine are studied in tandem and the reciprocal relationship between them is revealed. In this context, the essay shows how Hegel’s interpretation of religion—viz. as a trans-cultural vehicle of human maturation—can make a significant contribution to our thinking about globalization, the pursuit of reciprocal recognition, and (...) the future of Christianity. I conclude my essay by demonstrating that Stewart’s interpretation positions us to understand that Hegel not only accommodates, but also authorizes, the articulations of religious exemplarity advanced by two of his greatest critics: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

In his 2009 film District 9, Neill Blomkamp employs a handheld camera to create the effect of an embedded documentary film, which ostensibly is devoted to an objective treatment of the escalating tensions between a stranded alien race – known only as the ‘Prawns’ – and the increasingly agitated citizens of Johannesburg. Mobilizing the self-critical perspective afforded him by this mise en abyme, Blomkamp demonstrates the extent to which the presumption of objectivity allows the documentary filmmaker to frame the new (...) reality to which a reluctant populace gradually accustoms itself. As depicted in the embedded documentary, the new reality is that human–Prawn relations have been damaged beyond repair. As such, the proposed relocation of the Prawns, which initially may have been utterly unthinkable to most residents of Johannesburg, rounds into view as the best and most reasonable option for all involved. According to Blomkamp, that is, the anonymous documentarians not only report the slow, incremental embrace of genocide – represented in the film by the unseen District 10 – but also play a largely unacknowledged role in promoting this transition. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 29-52.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Western tradition of philosophy. Especially well known are his seminal contributions to existentialism, philosophy of religion, and cultural criticism. His novel experiments with pseudonymy, irony, satire, allegory and self-erasure have influenced the development of various strands of 'post-structuralist' and 'post-modern' thought in the twentieth century. The secondary literature devoted to his thought is consequently distributed across a number of academic disciplines, including philosophy, literature, religion, political theory and history. (...) These volumes are designed to allow current debates on key themes to be followed through in depth without having to seek additional sources, while giving readers an appreciation of the diversity of philosophical approaches and interpretive strategies which characterize recent Kierkegaard scholarship. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 139-162.

Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death receives welcome, complementary illustrations in the novelistic efforts, respectively, of Franz Kafka and J.M. Coetzee. Both Kafka and Coetzee succeed in fashioning dramatic settings in which their protagonists may be seen and understood to suffer from the sickness unto death. In both cases, moreover, the distinctly spiritual character of despair is on display, as the protagonists in question slowly come to the realization that their cognitive faculties and resources will afford them (...) no protection against, or immunity from, the despair they see in others. Finally, both Kafka and Coetzee succeed in depicting the first-personal experience of despair as that of a progressively suffocating claustrophobia. (shrink)

This collection both reflects and contributes to the recent surge of philosophical interest in The Antichrist and represents a major contribution to Nietzsche studies. Nietzsche regarded The Antichrist, along with Zarathustra, as his most important work. In it he outlined many epoch-defining ideas, including his dawning realisation of the 'death of God' and the inception of a new, post-moral epoch in Western history. He called the work 'a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision (...) that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed'. One certainly need not share Nietzsche's estimation of his achievement in The Antichrist to conclude that there is something significant going on in this work. Indeed, even if Nietzsche overestimated its transformative power, it would be valuable nonetheless to have a clearer sense of why he thought so highly of this particular book, which is something of an outlier in his oeuvre. Until now, there has been no book that attempts to account with philosophical precision for the multiple themes addressed in this difficult and complex work. (shrink)

v. 1. Incipit Zarathustra/Incipit tragoedia: art, music, representation, and style -- v. 2. The world as will to power- - and nothing else? : metaphysics and epistemology -- v. 3. On morality -- v. 4. The last man and the overman: Nietzsche's politics.

I propose that the interpretation which I present of Nietzsche's central text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, enables us to construct an account of his positive contribution to moral philosophy. I maintain herein that Nietzsche advances an aretaic moral program. That is, he is primarily concerned not with promoting right action, but with promoting a virtuous state of character. ;Negatively stated, my thesis represents a challenge to the standard interpretation of Nietzsche as an amoral critic who equates the good life with a (...) voluntaristic legislation of anti-social values. I maintain that Nietzsche's famous debunking of the canonical values of the Western moral tradition is in fact designed to clear the way for a revaluation of our approach to morality as an enterprise. According to Nietzsche, virtually all accounts of moral excellence hitherto have presupposed the deficiency of mankind. The moral enterprise has thus been understood as a systematic campaign to improve mankind by redeeming this original deficiency. In short, Nietzsche's critical position comes down to this: man cannot very well flourish if his pursuit of happiness is predicated on a view of himself as morally deficient. ;Nietzsche therefore recommends a moral program which pre- supposes the sufficiency of mankind: human nature requires no improvement in the traditionally moral sense. I have identified as the exemplar of these virtues of self-sufficiency the notorious Ubermensch; here again my interpretation of Nietzsche runs counter to the standard readings of his philosophy. The Ubermensch as a virtuous type is characterized by his command of a coherent and meaningful agency: because his pursuit of the good life is predicated on a prejudice in favor of his own sufficiency, he flourishes. ;Because of the unique problems of presentation which would attend a moral program based on man's sufficiency, I concentrate my attention on a non-standard philosophic text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Indeed, I propose that Zarathustra embodies Nietzsche's oblique contribution to moral excellence. That is, after having exposed the practicum absurdum of slave morality, he cannot then reject it on moral grounds without thereby compromising his original commitment to man's sufficiency. He therefore restricts himself to an aesthetic critique of slave morality. (shrink)