It has become orthodox to read Nietzsche as proposing the ‘sublimation’ of troublesome behavioural impulses. On this interpretation, he is said to denigrate the elimination of our impulses, preferring that we master them by pressing them into the service of our higher goals. My thesis is that this reading of Nietzsche’s conception of self-cultivation does not bear scrutiny. Closer examination of his later thought reveals numerous texts that show him explicitly recommending an eliminatory approach to self-cultivation. I invoke his theory (...) of the will to power in order to explain why he persistently valorises both elimination and sublimation as preconditions of healthy subjective unity. I conclude that which of these two approaches he recommends in a given situation depends on whether or not the impulse in question can be put to use within the overall economy of our drives. (shrink)

Arrival offers a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind and language. Assessing human linguists' interpretive efforts to understand the alien heptapod form of life in both the movie and the novella from which it was adapted (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”) teach us how our understanding of selfhood shapes our conception of agency. Arrival’s reflexive commentary on the cinematic experience is also an argument for the value of learning to communicate in cinematic language.

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude towards envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy – or what he calls general envy – poses to political stability. By contrast, he does not think that particular envy – the type of envy that arises between peers competing for the same objects – would be in any way problematic for his ideal political society. I contest this claim by pointing to the politically deleterious effects (...) that peer envy would likely have within a society ordered according to his principles of justice. Section 1 reconstructs Rawls’s conception of peer envy, underlining the causal connection that he draws between this emotion and rivalry. Section 2 argues that since Rawls wishes to promote rivalry within the political and economic spheres, there is good reason to believe that his ideal just society would be marked by elevated levels of peer envy – and perhaps hazardously so. In Section 3, I then briefly turn to ancient Greece, showing how its agonistic culture generated politically destabilizing levels of peer envy. This is followed by an overview of the key institutional mechanisms that the Greeks developed in order to keep peer envy within socially beneficial limits. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society structured around political and economic rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the institutional means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

I do not recommend peace to you, but victory instead. Your work shall be a struggle, your peace shall be a victory!As can be seen from the epigraph, Nietzsche famously entreats his readers to pursue a life of struggle and victory as opposed to one of peace. This is not a singular occurrence. For instance, in a notebook entry of the same period, he calls for an "unleashing of struggle [Kampf]" with the objective of instigating sociocultural rejuvenation, thereby echoing many (...) of the social Darwinists of his day. But what specific kind of struggle does he think acts as the constitutive ground of a vibrant society? After all, the German term Kampf is underdetermined.... (shrink)

Burton Dreben taught a generation of scholars the value of closely attending to the recent philosophical past. But the few papers he authored do little to capture his philosophical voice. In this article, I turn instead to an unpublished transcript of Dreben in conversation with his contemporaries. In addition to yielding insights into a transitional period in W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s thought, I argue that this document showcases Dreben in his element, revealing the way that he shaped the views (...) of key analytic philosophers. More broadly, I argue that by writing conversationalists like Dreben into our histories we can capture the collaborative nature of philosophy. (shrink)

The ethics of immigration is currently marked by a division between realists and idealists. The idealists generally focus on formulating morally ideal immigration policies. The realists, however, tend to dismiss these ideals as far-fetched and infeasible. In contrast to the idealists, the realists seek to resolve pressing practical issues relating to immigration, principally by advancing what they consider to be actionable policy recommendations. In this article, I take issue with this conception of realism. I begin by surveying the way in (...) which it exemplifies what certain political theorists have recently called ‘problem-solving’ realism – a species of realism which they reject as incoherent. These theorists demonstrate that what counts as a ‘feasible’ solution is far harder to establish than most problem-solving realists would have us believe. Applying this general critique to the specific domain of immigration ethics turns out to radically undermine the notion of realism that prevails in this sphere of applied ethics. I conclude that we should therefore revise our conception of what constitutes a genuinely realist approach to the problem of immigration. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to Nietzsche, both modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this paper, I examine how he proposes we combat this affliction in his Untimely Meditations. I argue that he advocates a dual struggle involving both instrumental domination and eradication. On these grounds, I claim the following: 1. pace a growing number of commentators, we cannot categorise the species of conflict he endorses in the Untimely Meditations as agonistic; and 2. this conflict is better understood as analogous to the (...) species of struggle that Schopenhauer describes in his account of purposive organisation. (shrink)

Given W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s extensive agreement about much of the philosophy of language and mind, and the obvious methodological parallels between Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation, many—including Quine and Davidson—are puzzled by their occasional disagreements. I argue for the importance of attending to these disagreements, not just because doing so deepens our understanding of these influential thinkers, but because they are in fact the shadows thrown from two distinct conceptions of philosophical inquiry: Quine’s “naturalism” and what (...) I call Davidson’s “humanism.” The clash between Quine and Davidson thus provides valuable insight into the history of analytic naturalism and its malcontents. (shrink)

Until recently, theorists of creativity have consistently maintained that two necessary conditions must be satisfied in order for us to legitimately ascribe creativity to a given phenomenon: a) that it exhibit novelty, and b) that it possess value. However, researchers investigating malevolent forms of creativity have claimed that the value condition is problematic insofar as we often ascribe creativity to products that are of entirely negative value for us. This has given rise to a number of modified conceptions of the (...) value condition, all of which I argue are inadequate (Sections 1 and 2). To address this issue, I advance a novel conception of creative value (Section 3). My contention is that even though malevolent creative products may be of net-negative value, they are nonetheless endowed with a degree of positive value for the predicating individual – that is, insofar as the salient originality of such products elicits an intrinsically-valuable affect of surprise. In Section 4 I then examine the way in which this affect promotes cultural flourishing and to that extent may be considered instrumentally valuable. The principal conclusion of these observations is that the existence of malevolent creativity does not genuinely controvert the standard view that creative products must possess positive value for the predicating individual. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth, and, more specifically, the metaphysical tradition, is inextricable from both his philosophy of language and his turn to physiology. Though the way in which Nietzsche conceived of the intertwinement of language, reason, and the body developed through the course of his philosophical maturation, it is nonetheless a recurrent motif spanning the breadth of his oeuvre. As the editors state in their introduction to Nietzsche on Instinct and Language (NIL), the volume aims at being (...) a “fresh look” at Nietzsche’s repeated attempts to bridge these domains (xv). Beyond this singular and broad explicit aim, however, the volume intimates a number of other more specific aspirations. .. (shrink)

This essay argues for the value of teaching a unit that questions what it is that philosophers teach as a way of encouraging students to reflect on the nature of philosophy. I show how using ancient philosophy to frame this unit makes it especially urgent, since an important (and often overlooked) consequence of Socrates’s demarcation of philosophy from oratory is that philosophers are not in a position to teach anything. I have found that students are eager to engage the challenge (...) that this seems to pose for the contemporary philosophy classroom. Further, they can self-reflectively employ philosophical analysis to identify and critique ways of justifying what they learn from teachers of philosophy. (shrink)

In Word and Object, W.V. Quine dismisses connotations that result from the work of explicating expressions as “don’t-cares.” This paper traces the history of this phrase to an algorithm that Quine developed in the 1950s, which became important in early computer engineering. Computer programmers eventually came to realize that it was in their best interests to abandon the “don’t-care” attitude. Similarly, I argue that naturalists who properly appreciate the communal nature of their inquiries have reason to adopt a more careful (...) approach when they propose and evaluate explications. (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser claims the late Haneke as a director of ‘mind-game’ films, but his diagnosis of the appeal of such films fails to account for The White Ribbon . In this paper, I draw on the theory of radical interpretation developed by American philosopher Donald Davidson to uncover the film’s power. I argue that the focus on charity in Davidson’s account of the conditions under which an interpreter is able to find a foreign community intelligible illuminates the exquisite discomfort the (...) spectator experiences as she begins to understand the disturbed community that the film portrays. In addition, the film exposes that Davidson’s transcendental argument that language is a condition of mindedness ought to be extended along emotional and moral dimensions. We should not only hold that every rational mind is a language-user, but that every rational mind is an appropriate language-user, so as to account for minds that have true, justified beliefs but which are, nevertheless, disturbed. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche's work. The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche's ontology of conflict; Nietzsche's conception of the agon; and Nietzsche's warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche's understanding of (...) resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict. Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche's thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 3-32.

Review of the book Disagreement by Bryan Frances. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.

Attention to the question of whether testimony is a distinctive source of knowledge is a comparatively recent development in Western epistemology. Does being told that p constitute reason for you to believe that p, independently of what you empirically establish about the speaker’s reliability, sincerity, and evaluative position? Still more recently — in just the last decade — Western epistemologists have become occupied with related problems concerning disagreement. What is the rational response, for instance, to discovering that an epistemic peer (...) disagrees with you about p? In the battery of new articles that explore this question, various fine-grained distinctions have been proposed to accommodate cases where it.. (shrink)

Although the significs movement that Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912) inspired was dedicated to better understanding meaning, she has largely been forgotten by analytic philosophers of language. Significs was to educate “the great world of hearers and the growing world of readers” to better interpret science and philosophy, evincing a focus on the audience for intellectual activity that it remains vital for academics to consider. Her arguments that the metaphorical associations of terminology are part of their significance for others also pertain (...) to contemporary programs of conceptual engineering which seek to craft and stipulate the meaning of terms. Welby would prefer, I contend, P. F. Strawson’s connective model of analysis, in which the aim is neither to replace nor reduce our concepts, but rather to carefully describe their interrelations. Connective analysis, she would argue, encourages us to keep others, rather than ourselves, firmly in view. I close by turning the lens afforded by Welby’s suggestions for educational reform upon the way we might best communicate philosophical ideas throughout society. (shrink)