Introduction : reading Nietzsche skeptically -- Nietzsche and the Pyrrhonian tradition -- Skepticism in Nietzsche's early work : the case of "on truth and lie" -- The question of Nietzsche's "naturalism" -- Perspectivism and Ephexis in interpretation -- Skepticism and health -- Skepticism as immoralism.

Three papers included in this issue were presented to the North American Nietzsche Society (NANS) in San Francisco during the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Participants were invited by the NANS program committee to address the theme, “Nietzsche and Antiquity.” The session, held on March 31, 2010 and chaired by R. Lanier Anderson (Stanford), included papers by Nickolas Pappas (CUNY), who proposes to shed new light on BT by examining some peculiar distortions in Nietzsche’s presentation of the (...) god Apollo; Joel E. Mann (St. Norbert College), who delves insightfully into Nietzsche’s “medical posture” and his allusions to Hippocrates and ancient medicine in D; and Wilson H. Shearin .. (shrink)

This issue includes four papers originally presented to the North American Nietzsche Society at group sessions of the April 2007 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago. The program committee selected these papers by blind review from among responses to its annual call for papers. In Session I, chaired by Jacqueline Scott (Loyola University Chicago), Morgan Rempel, now Associate Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, presented a reading of Daybreak 72, and Bryan Finken, currently teaching at (...) the University of Colorado at Denver, presented his examination of a peculiar type of genetic fallacy against which Nietzsche struggles, especially in his earlier published .. (shrink)

The papers published in this issue were presented at North American Nietzsche Society (NANS) sessions held in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association from the end of 2007 through 2009. I would like to thank Richard Schacht and the other members of the program committee for their continued service to Nietzsche studies, and I thank Cameron Smith for invaluable editorial assistance in the production of this issue. The first three papers published here were presented on December (...) 29, 2007 at the Eastern Division Meeting in Baltimore, where NANS held an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session devoted to a discussion of Robert B. Pippin’s Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception .. (shrink)

What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The Journal of Nietzsche Studies recently put these questions to some of the most prominent names in Anglophone Nietzsche scholarship. Here, we bring you ten thoughtful responses, as a starting point for shaping discussions in these pages and elsewhere about the (...) most fruitful directions for us to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent... (shrink)

Dear Readers,In this issue, several authors contribute their insights on social and political themes in Nietzsche: Robert Miner looks to the works of the “middle period” to add nuance to Nietzsche’s critical attitude to socialism; Birte Loschenkohl asks again what Nietzsche has in mind with his enigmatic call for “great politics,” arguing that Zarathustra holds the key to understanding his vision; and Sacha Golob looks back to the second Untimely Meditation to analyze Nietzsche’s views on education and the role that (...) exemplary figures like Schopenhauer can and should play in that process. Iain Morrison, too, by focusing on the question of how drives and affects create the systems of value that take hold within... (shrink)

Dear Readers,In this issue, several authors contribute their insights on social and political themes in Nietzsche: Robert Miner looks to the works of the “middle period” to add nuance to Nietzsche’s critical attitude to socialism; Birte Loschenkohl asks again what Nietzsche has in mind with his enigmatic call for “great politics,” arguing that Zarathustra holds the key to understanding his vision; and Sacha Golob looks back to the second Untimely Meditation to analyze Nietzsche’s views on education and the role that (...) exemplary figures like Schopenhauer can and should play in that process. Iain Morrison, too, by focusing on the question of how drives and affects create the systems of value that take hold within... (shrink)

Nietzsche's Antichrist is subtitled "A Curse on Christianity." In its last numbered section, he pronounces his "eternal indictment" of two millennia of tradition: —Now I have come to the end and I pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity, I indict the Christian church on the most terrible charges an accuser has ever had in his mouth. I consider it the greatest corruption conceivable, it had the will to the last possible corruption. [...] I want to write this eternal indictment of (...) Christianity on every wall, wherever there are walls,—[...] I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge that does not consider any method to be poisonous... (shrink)

A growing literature in recent epistemology leverages the fact of persistent, systematic disagreement among philosophers to reach deeply skeptical conclusions, not just about philosophical propositions, but about the practice of philosophy itself. This article argues that a version of this argument is implicit in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and that Nietzsche is best read as occupying a stance that would be called “conciliationist” today. The only sincere effort to date to attribute to Nietzsche a skeptical position on the basis (...) of disagreement, I argue, both overcommits him in some ways and undercommits him in others. Correctly assessing his target and scope and appreciating the conciliationist strain in Nietzsche’s thought improves our understanding of his philosophical project. (shrink)

Professional philosophy is overdue for a Pyrrhonian revival. For too long, the skeptic has been either overlooked or regarded as an object of pity (for the feebleness of his arguments) or contempt (for his appearing to thumb his nose at the canons of reason and morality). Even among the most learned and philosophically astute commentators, those who would be best positioned to develop a philosophically sophisticated and compelling interpretation of Pyrrhonism, it has found few defenders, many detractors, and has generally (...) suffered by its having been misunderstood, caricatured, or conflated with contemporary varieties of skepticism. Casey Perin's eloquent little essay is therefore a refreshing contribution to the .. (shrink)

The intellectual history of Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is sometimes compared to the philosophical achievement of Athens at the very height of the classical age. Both were tremendously fruitful periods, which saw the birth of revolutionary philosophical systems that inspired a fantastic intellectual commerce among new and rival schools of thought. The plenitude of references to Greek mythology in literary works from Goethe and Lessing to Schiller, Novalis, and Hölderlin; the burgeoning interest in classical philology and (...) the translation and transmission of works of antiquity; and the growing interest in the history of skepticism in ancient Greece; all are instances of a widespread preoccupation with Hellenic thought and culture that persisted throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The intellectual associations between many seminal thinkers during this time make it easy to trace the transmission of this enthusiasm from one figure or group to another. (shrink)