In his Logic, Hegel argues that evaluative judgments are comparisons between the reality of an individual object and the standard for that reality found in the object's own concept. Understood in this way, an object is bad (ugly, etc.) insofar as it fails to be what it is according to its concept. In his recent Life and Action, Michael Thompson has suggested that we can understand various kinds of natural defect (i.e., defects in living things) in a similar way, and (...) that if we do, we can helpfully see intellectual and moral badness—irrationality and vice—as themselves varieties of natural defect. In this paper, I argue that Hegel's position on animal individuality denies the claim that irrationality and vice are forms of natural defect. Hegel's account of the individuality proper to the animal organism in the Philosophy of Nature clearly disallows evaluative judgments about animals and thereby establishes a well-defined conceptual distinction between natural defect and intellectual or ethical—i.e., broadly spiritual or geistliche—defect. Hegel thus provides a way of maintaining the difference between nature and spirit within his broader commitment to a post-Kantian conception of substantial form. (shrink)

A review of a volume on Neo-Kantianism edited by Rudolf Makkreel and Sebastian Luft. -/- .

The paper explores the relation between Kierkegaard’s concept of a “life-view,” understood as a certain quality of a person’s character, and his early account of Christian faith. To claim the need for such an exploration is motivated by two observations: First, defining a “life-view” as “an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience” (Kierkegaard’s formula in his debut book From the Papers of One Still Living [1838]) essentially conforms with his characterization of faith as an “a priori certainty.” Second, (...) the relation between Kierkegaard’s notion of “life-view” and his concept of faith has been interpreted in different, at times in-compatible ways by Kierkegaard-scholars. Thus, after outlining the overall argument in Kierkegaard’s debut book, I will compare in detail the notions of “life-view” and faith, and this by using as a vantage point and paradigmatic example the opposing accounts of Emanuel Hirsch and Ulrich Klenke. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o conceito de vivência (Erlebnis) na filosofia de Nietzsche, desde o seu primeiro emprego em língua alemã, seu significado e a recepção que Nietzsche faz da palavra no interior da sua filosofia. O conceito de Erlebnis, particularmente caro à filosofia de Nietzsche, mas também à fenomenologia, possui originariamente uma tríplice significação: a) a imediatez (Unmittelbarkeit) entre homem e mundo; b) a significabilidade (Bedeutsamkeit) para o caráter global da existência; e c) a incomensurabilidade (Inkommensurabilität) do (...) conteúdo da própria vivência, conferindo a ela também uma dimensão estética. A tríplice significação de Erlebnis implica na sua estreita associação a pathos. This paper aims to analyze the concept of experience (Erlebnis) in the Nietzsche's philosophy, since its first use into the German language, its meaning and reception of Nietzsche inside his philosophy. The concept of Erlebnis, especially dear to the philosophy of Nietzsche, but also to phenomenology, originally has a triple meaning: a) the immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) between man and world, b) meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) to the global nature of existence and c) incommensurability (Inkommensurabilität) of the experience's content itself, giving it also an aesthetic dimension. The threefold meaning of Erlebnis implies its close association with pathos. (shrink)

As its title indicates, this book is a study of the trip Nietzsche made to Sorrento in 1876, after the Bayreuth festival and before the publication of Human, All Too Human. Paolo D’Iorio’s main thesis is that at Sorrento Nietzsche became a true philosopher, abandoning his metaphysics of art together with his commitment to the Wagnerian cause in order to develop his philosophy of the free spirit. D’Iorio collects all of the available documents about the Sorrento trip, from Nietzsche’s allusions (...) to his Italian experiences in his notebooks and subsequent works to letters to and from his traveling companions and memoirs of friends and acquaintances. The chief interest of the book lies in this philological work, which .. (shrink)

Alice Gonzi’s Zarathustra a Parigi analyzes the complex reception of Nietzsche’s work in French culture between 1877 and 1930. In the first chapter, she shows how French academic philosophy, generally of neo-Kantian orientation, and the Wagnerian circles in Paris in this period did not consider Nietzsche a canonical philosopher, but rather stigmatized his thought and minimized its importance. As early as 1891, Téodor de Wyzewa, in his F. Nietzsche, le dernier metaphysician, praised Nietzsche as a writer while criticizing him as (...) a radical nihilist and pessimist. Although authors such as Daniel Halévy and Fernand Gregh treated Nietzsche as a philosopher of health and joy as well as a promoter of optimism and amor .. (shrink)

Few will dispute that the sciences were of special importance to Nietzsche. The natural and human sciences had a significant influence on his thought from the very beginning, and his writings probe and engage with them, exploring their interrelations as well as their place in an adequate broader view of our existence. By contrast, it is less clear whether Nietzsche had, or thought that we could have, something that amounts to a philosophy of science. To the extent that he did, (...) we must ask what its content and value may be. This involves asking whether his thought can help to explain what natural science is, what it can and cannot do, and how it relates to other areas of enquiry. Similarly, we must ask how it can .. (shrink)

Toward the conclusion of his study, Axel Pichler likens Nietzsche’s writings to the actions of a suicide bomber, for whom fulfillment of purpose necessarily entails self-destruction. Such explosive imagery is certainly not alien to Nietzsche, who notoriously claims to be dynamite, tearing a rift between philosophy’s past and future, and when we speak with Richard Rorty of “post-Nietzschean philosophy,” we breathe the fumes of this blast. Descriptions of this rupture have largely focused on Nietzsche’s attacks on the pillars of systematic (...) philosophy, which tremble at his accounts of the arbitrariness of language, the unavoidably perspectival nature of all knowledge, the irreducible contingency of truth, and the .. (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)

The hermeneutic thicket surrounding the question of Nietzsche and the Greeks is both dense and forbidding. Every attempt to pose this question confronts a wide range of difficult issues. Who is “Nietzsche”? Which “Greeks”? What range of concerns? methods? disciplinary boundaries? How to think the relation between the early Nietzsche of the Basel years and the later Nietzsche post-Zarathustra? Where to turn for help in working through the palimpsest of interpretations that have formed the Nietzschebild in our time? To simply (...) raise such questions proves inadequate, of course, to the task of effecting a shift in the way Nietzsche scholars approach this topic. There is little consensus on what “the” Greeks mean for .. (shrink)

As early as 1941, George Allen Morgan wrote that Nietzsche’s thought is “saturated with the historical point of view.” It is breathtaking how long it has taken scholarly writing on Nietzsche to catch up with Morgan and pay this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought the serious attention it deserves. Marcus Andreas Born’s study is therefore a very welcome development as a serious and engaged examination of Nietzsche’s “historical thought.” As his subtitle indicates, Born’s approach focuses on Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy. He (...) ties genealogy closely to history by suggesting that Nietzsche proposes genealogy as his way of revising, and improving on, existing approaches to history (18). For Born, as for .. (shrink)

In his Menschenwürde nach Nietzsche: Die Geschichte eines Begriffes (Human Dignity According to/after Nietzsche: The History of a Concept), Stefan Lorenz Sorgner conceives a bold plan and executes it remarkably well, with noteworthy results. His plan entails describing four paradigmatic notions of human dignity, then presenting Nietzsche’s critical evaluation of the notion of human dignity in relation to the four paradigms, and finally, reflecting on Nietzsche’s criticism in a way that embraces much of it and, consequently, largely rejects the humanist (...) notion of the dignity of man. Sorgner takes the additional steps of arguing for a posthumanism to replace the outmoded humanist notion of human dignity. Each phase .. (shrink)

In Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence, Philip J. Kain makes a compelling case for taking Nietzsche’s concern with the subject of horror seriously and then challenges his conclusions about it. A corollary of existence, horror is an ineliminable part of being human. Our experience of horror prompts reflection on life and the act of philosophizing. Arguing it is a formative yet often overlooked theme in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Kain recognizes that the experience of horror is central to “Nietzsche’s vision” of (...) life, truth, beauty, and knowledge (1). Kain examines Nietzsche’s interrogation of philosophical responses to horror, tracing his approach from his innovative reinterpretation of the function of tragic .. (shrink)

La pensée de Brentano a exercé une durable influence sur la Philosophie en Pologne surtout grâce à Casimir Twardowski, disciple de Brentano et lui-même fondateur d'une importante école philosophique, proche en son ésprit de la philosophie analytique. Twardowski tout en développant certaines idées de Brentano parvenait dans diverses questions aux solutions opposées à Celles de son maître. L'article cherche à préciser les résultats de cette continuation et de cette opposition dans l'oeuvre de Twardowski et de ses disciples tels que Łukasiewicz, (...) Kotarbiński, Czeżowksi, e.a. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in the context of 19th century epistemology. In particular, I argue that, even though Nietzsche shows the ontological lack of content of truths (both on the theoretic and on the moral plane), he nevertheless leaves the space for a practical use of them, in a way that can be compared with William James' pragmatism. I thus deal with Nietzsche's and James' concept of "truth", and show their relationship with some outcomes (...) of Ernst Mach's epistemology. (shrink)

In the final essay of Totem and Taboo, Freud infamously claims that civilization began when a band of brothers brutally murdered their father. This postulation leads Freud to conclude that "the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex,"1 and, accordingly, most readers, regardless of their argument, presuppose that the text depicts a "fundamental oedipal revolt."2 This is how Peter Gay characterizes the action of Totem and Taboo in his short introduction to the Norton Standard Edition, (...) and this is how the text is generally remembered. While we may forget the moves of Freud's argument and the details of his historical narrative—not to mention the first three essays of the .. (shrink)

Russell brought three arguments forward against Meinong's theory of objects. None of them depend upon a misinterpretation of the theory as is often claimed. In particular, only one is based upon a clash between Meinong's theory and Russell's theory of descriptions, and that did not involve Russell's attributing to Meinong his own ontological assumption. The other two arguments were attempts to find internal inconsistencies in Meinong's theory. But neither was sufficient to refute the theory, though they do require some revisions, (...) viz. a trade-off between freedom of assumption and unhmited characterization. Meinong himself worked out the essentials of the required revisions. (shrink)

Meinong's thought is considered in relation to several major conceptual problems, including the Frege-Russell thesis that words like is are multiply ambiguos and Aristotle's treatment of existence. This treatment leads to a problem of how to interpret quantifiers. The three main possible interpretations are: (i) quantifiers as ranging over actual individuals (or individuals existing in some one world); (ii) quantifiers as ranging over a set of possible individuals; (iii) quantifiers merely as a way of specifying the interdependencies of the concepts (...) (forms) specified by syllogistic terms. The subsequent history of philosophers' and logicians' treatments of existence is characterized by a tension between (i)-(iii). Meinong's position is in the main (iii) whereas Russell in his On Denoting defended (i). The contrast between (i) and (iii) has a counterpart in nineteenth-century discussions about foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper considers and criticizes Brentano's contention of the identity in kind between will and emotion.

Bd. 1. 1791-1794.--Bd. 2. 1793-1795.--Bd. 3.--1794-1796.--Bd. 4. 1797-1798.--Bd. 5. 1798-1799.--Bd. 6. 1799-1800.--Bd. 7. 1800-1801.--Bd. 8. 1801-1806.--Bd. 9. 1806-1807.--Bd. 10. 1808-1812.

Cette etude est une analyse des uvres de Nietzsche (1878-1885) ayant trait non seulement a sa critique du christianisme en general et a son interpretation de la Mort de Dieu en particulier, mais aussi a l'elaboration de ses anti-ideals.

I. Growing up zigzag: -- Art is my vocation -- Newport and the Jameses -- The father -- Harvard, 1861 -- Science and the Civil War -- Comparative anatomy and medical school -- The gulls at the mouth of the Amazon -- Tea squalls and a life according to nature -- We must be our own providence -- A dead and drifting life -- Minnie Temple -- William James, M.D. -- Treading water -- The end of youth -- II. The (...) action of consciousness: Hitting bottom -- Turning to physiology -- The Metaphysical Club and Chauncey Wright -- Charles Pierce -- Cambridge and Harvard, 1872 -- Teaching -- To Europe and back -- Emerson, Mill, and Blood -- From physiology to physiological psychology -- Days of rapture and heartbreak -- The trouble with Herbert Spencer -- The action of consciousness -- III. The principles of Psychology: Spaces -- The heart wants its chance -- The feeling of effort -- Hegel in Cambridge -- Death of a mother -- Goodbye, my sacred old father -- The wonderful stream of our consciousness -- Not a simple temperament -- What is an emotion? -- The literary remains of Henry James Sr. -- The death of Herman -- Mrs. Leonora Piper -- My only absolutely satisfying companion (Alice) -- Hypnotism and summers at Chocorua -- Instinct and will -- Santayana at Harvard -- The psychology of belief -- Reunion with Alice: the hidden self --. (shrink)

Indledning -- Baggrund: Guldalderperioden, 1800-1850 ;Romantikken, den historiske kristendom -- Kierkegaards udvikling ; Lidelsen som kristendommens grundlag -- Konfrontationen: N.F.S. Grundtvig ; H.L. Martensen ; J.P. Mynster -- Den bestående kirke under forandring ; Opgøret i de sidste år, 1848-1855 -- Afslutning.