Abstract

A central thesis of my interpretation of Nietzsche has long been that he fundamentally was a naturalistic thinker, who had a significant philosophical agenda that is best understood accordingly.1 This is a characterization with which many—in the analytically minded part of the philosophical community, at any rate—have come to agree. But there are many kinds of things called "naturalism" in the philosophical literature; and it would be a mistake to suppose that any of them in particular is what Nietzsche espoused or was moving toward—especially since there are some kinds of naturalism of which he himself is quite disdainful, and even scathingly critical. For example, there is the "mechanistic" kind he calls one of ..