This essay recounts recent psychiatric literature about the probable causes of Nietzsche's collapse, endorsing the conclusion that it was not syphilis. The essay then explores the role of madness in Nietzsche's philosophy, and also explores to what extent some sort of madness - whether psychological or philosophical - influenced his later philosophy.

This paper is an extended version of "Valuing from life's perspective." In this paper, with the aim of explaining Nietzsche's view, I illustrate one way of making sense of a theoretical entity (called "Life"), which has values and a perspective. Then I turn to Nietzsche's perspectivism, with the hope of explaining why Life's perspective should be in any way privileged. Finally, I explain how trying to live from Life's perspective would force us to change our values - and, in particular, (...) disown the values we have placed in truth (at least for its own sake) and traditional morality. (shrink)

It can be fairly said that the Fall of Adam is not much on the minds of scientists nowadays. But apparently it was in the days of the scientific revolution. Jones reads Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz as all discovering in the new science different implications for our ruined natural state. For these thinkers , the Fall meant losing epistemic privileges and moral attunement. Losing Eden meant losing our place in the universe. And the promise of the new science, some hoped, (...) was that we could gain a better perspective of our place and adjust our expectations accordingly: “mathematics and natural philosophy offered both empirical evidence for humanity’s capacities and, if correctly tuned, remedies for its faults” . But the remedies these philosophers advocated differed in significant ways.For Descartes, the remedy was to secure the right method. Indeed, Jones reads the Geometry as meant as an Ignatius Loyola-like set of exercises for disciplining the human mind. Rather than memorizing scholastic definitions and snapping them together like pieces in a puzzle, Descartes advocated problem-solving mechanisms in which the interdependence of the. (shrink)

Nietzsche launches powerful critiques of traditional moral values on the basis of “life's perspectives and objectives.” But what does this mean? Several recent commentators have tried to provide an explanation by ascribing to Nietzsche a will-to-power metaphysic, but there are solid reasons for thinking that Nietzsche did not intend to provide any comprehensive metaphysical system. This paper explains “life's perspectives” by showing how to construct a theoretical entity (“Life”) that has a perspective and can do the philosophical work Nietzsche requires. (...) Moreover, it shows why employing such a construct, as a heuristic, does not lead to ascribing a robust metaphysical system to Nietzsche. (shrink)

This book is a commentary on volume four of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer had not completed this volume at the time of his death. The texts related to Cassirer’s preliminary work on it have been assembled and translated recently by John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene. Bayer’s book is a commentary on these texts, and since it is meant only as a commentary, as Verene notes in his introduction, “Bayer does not propose to solve problems that may (...) lie within Cassirer’s metaphysics. Her method of commentary takes the reader progressively through Cassirer’s claims, and she reminds the reader how each point stands in relation to the general themes of Cassirer’s position”. So although the book offers a general and helpful summary of the foundational features of Cassirer’s philosophy, it does not offer a deeper or clearer understanding of it. (shrink)

It can be fairly said that the Fall of Adam is not much on the minds of scientists nowadays. But apparently it was in the days of the scientific revolution. Jones reads Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz as all discovering in the new science different implications for our ruined natural state. For these thinkers , the Fall meant losing epistemic privileges and moral attunement. Losing Eden meant losing our place in the universe. And the promise of the new science, some hoped, (...) was that we could gain a better perspective of our place and adjust our expectations accordingly: “mathematics and natural philosophy offered both empirical evidence for humanity’s capacities and, if correctly tuned, remedies for its faults” . But the remedies these philosophers advocated differed in significant ways.For Descartes, the remedy was to secure the right method. Indeed, Jones reads the Geometry as meant as an Ignatius Loyola-like set of exercises for disciplining the human mind. Rather than memorizing scholastic definitions and snapping them together like pieces in a puzzle, Descartes advocated problem-solving mechanisms in which the interdependence of the. (shrink)