"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism , he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, to the (...) exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as "misarchism," or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the "exceptional beings" excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the "autonomous herd" and "mob rule." Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: "the self-overcoming of the human.". (shrink)

This paper defends the view of continuants as 'four-dimensional worms' against an argument of Geach's. This is to the effect that if continuants are four-dimensional worms then their stages either do, or do not, fall under the very general terms satisfied by the continuants themselves (a stage of a man either is, or is not, a man); but that either alternative is untenable. I try to show how the former alternative may be defended by appealing to some of Geach's own (...) ideas about identity; then go on to defend the four-dimensionalist view from a criticism of it by Mellor, and finish with an account of the intuitive distinction between process and continuant terms. (shrink)

This paper examines Nietzsche's attitude to the empirical by concentrating on his concept of Empfindung (sensation, perception, feeling). In Section 1, five distinctive features of his use of 'Empfindung' are described in relation to the philosophical tradition and some of his sources in 19 th Century physiology. All five features, I argue, point to Nietzsche's philosophical concern to stake out the limits of 'Empfindung' as an aspect of human finitude. In Section 2, my attention turns from the term 'Empfindung' to (...) Nietzsche's actual argumentation. The bewildering variety of perspectives and arguments concerning 'Empfindung' in his writings are broken down into three basic types of argument or discourse with radically different, incompatible presuppositions: a critical, epistemological discourse serving anti-metaphysical ends; a quasiscientific discourse serving critical-epistemological ends; and a quasi-ontological discourse of life that looks to explain the results of Nietzsche's critical epistemology. The value of this 'contradictory' practice, I contend, is twofold: Nietzsche makes epistemology fruitful for the philosophical problem of life; at the same time he offers a performative critique of epistemology by the manner in which he exceeds it. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 146-158. (shrink)

In the October 1978 issue of Mind, Nicholas Griffin puts forward a criticism of one of my arguments in 'Wiggins on Identity'. Although I would not now wish to defend everything I said in that paper, the argument Griffin attacks still seems to me to be a good one. In what follows, I explain why I think his criticism fails to strike home.