In "Nietzsche's Perspectivism", Steven Hales and Rex Welshon offer an analytic approach to Nietzsche's important idea that truth is perspectival. Drawing on Nietzsche's entire published corpus, along with manuscripts he never saw to press, they assess the different perspectivisms at work in Nietzsche's views with regard to truth, logic, causality, knowledge, consciousness, and the self. They also examine Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology of power and the attendant claims that substances and subjects are illusory while forces and alliances of power constitute the (...) only reality. Hales and Welshon present Nietzsche's treatment of perspectivism as both more complex and more fruitful than the common view of it as a doctrine that truth is not objective. Neither a metaphor nor a methodology, perspectivism emerges as a protean concept akin to a unifying theme; an alternative to the absolutism that recurs in science, philosophy, and religion; and a technique for revealing the unimagined possibilities open to every individual. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper, I articulate Jaegwon Kim's argument against emergent down ward causation. In the second section, I canvas four responses to Kim's argument and argue that each fails. In the third section, I show that emergent downward causation does not, contra Kim, entail overdetermination. I argue that supervenience of emergent upon base properties is not sufficient for nomological causal relationsbetween emergent and base properties. What sustains Kim's argument is rather the claim that emergent properties realized (...) by base properties can have no causal powers distinct from those base properties. I argue that this is false. (shrink)

An argument is developed for the conclusion that certain neurological conditions and disorders are directly relevant for understanding the self?'s embodiment and the ownership of conscious experience enjoyed by such an embodied self. Since these neurological conditions and disorders provide evidence that there can be shifts of, and compromises to, ownership, they help identify neural substrates and realizers of such ownership. However, even if recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological nominees for neural substrates of ownership unity are core realizers of ownership, they (...) are not its total realizers. Implications of the distinction between core and total realizers are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that, on plausible assumptions, anomalous entails monism epiphenomenalism of the mental. The plausible assumptions are (1) events are particulars; (2) causal relations are extensional; (3) mental properties are epiphrastic. A principle defender of anomalous monism, Donald Davidson, acknowledges that anomalous monism is committed to (1) and (2). I argue that it is committed to (3) as well. Given (1), (2), and (3), epiphenomenalism of the mental falls out immediately. Three attempts to salvage anomalous monism from epiphenomenalism of the (...) mental are examined and rejected. I conclude with reflections on the status of non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

An analysis and assessment of Nietzsche's metapsychology. Nietzsche is neither a dualist nor a physical reductionist about the mind. Instead, he is best interpreted as thinking that the mind is embodied and embedded in a larger natural and social environment with which it is dynamically engaged.

Volume 33, Issue 8, November 2020, Page 1096-1120.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way by Richard SchachtRex WelshonRichard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. xvii + 375 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82283-3 (cloth); 978-0-226-82286-0 (e-book). Cloth, $49.00; e-book, $48.99.Over the course of his distinguished career, Richard Schacht has written on alienation, value theory, and philosophical anthropology; he has analyzed the work of Hegel and coauthored a set of reflections (...) on Richard Wagner with Philip Kitcher. He has also recently completed the gigantic task of editing the two-volume Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant, and he is the sole editor of the set’s second volume, The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition. Still, for all of these achievements, his most enduring influence on philosophy is likely through his fifty-year-long engagement with the work of Nietzsche, which has produced several books and several dozen articles.Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way is Schacht’s most recent contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. In this book, Schacht investigates the following two-part question: What kind of philosopher was Nietzsche, and what kind of philosophy did he produce? Each of Schacht’s answers reveals a consummate knowledge of Nietzsche’s entire corpus, a comprehensive appreciation of his philosophical project, and a scrupulous appraisal of his philosophical contributions. At once magisterial, scholarly, astute, judicious, congenial, challenging, and occasionally frustrating, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy could have been written only by Schacht, and that is to say, among other things, that it is unique and deserving of praise.Schacht divides Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy into two parts. In the six chapters of the first and longer part, he canvases Nietzsche’s philosophical self-discovery following BT and UM. For Schacht, Nietzsche’s philosophical development begins in the latter half of the 1870s, after he resigned his professorship at the University of Basel, and ends with his 1889 collapse. So, after a prologue first chapter in which the challenges of understanding what kind of philosopher Nietzsche strove to become are discussed, Schacht examines, [End Page 232] in turn, 1878’s HH and 1881’s D (chapter 2); 1882’s Joyful Inquiry (GS), Books I–IV (chapter 3); Z, published in installments between 1883 and 1885 (chapter 4); BGE, from 1886, and 1887’s Joyful Inquiry, Book V (chapter 5); and then 1887’s GM and the final works from 1888, TI, CW, The A, and EH (chapter 6). In the second and somewhat shorter part of the book, Schacht allots five successive chapters to consider whether, and in what ways, Nietzsche can be identified as a nihilist, an existentialist, an individualist, a free spirit, and a naturalist.Given its scope, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy cannot be expected to provide, and should not be criticized for not providing, the kind of detailed topical analyses typical of so much Nietzsche scholarship from the past forty years. Indeed, diving deeply into the current scholarly debates is not one of Schacht’s goals. He tells us he is not interested in trying “to read and understand Nietzsche in terms of the conventions in the recent philosophical literature on various matters being debated as though he were a participant in them” (xiv). Rather, he wants to provide a reading of “Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy on its own terms,” as presented by someone who not only has “a lifetime of engagement with Nietzsche’s texts and thought” but also “cares deeply about philosophy and its future, and Nietzsche’s potential importance in that context” (xiv).Interpreting Nietzsche thusly has limitations. After all, the relation between philosophy and its own past is intimate, reflexive, and continuously interpretive, so one might wonder how Schacht proposes to exhibit Nietzsche’s importance to philosophy without understanding how his thought relates to the discipline’s current state or to what its future might yet become. But perhaps this concern is uncharitable; perhaps Schacht’s point is instead an admonishment against thinking too quickly that because Nietzsche was so far ahead of his time and anticipated so much that has... (shrink)

This paper discusses three related claims. The first claim is that the expressive limitations of iconic and indexical communication and cognition are reasonably measured by their minimal arbitrariness across three distinct dimensions—resemblance, alternative, and acquisition—when compared to the high measures of resemblance, alternative, and acquisition arbitrariness of symbolic communication and cognition. The second claim is that the ways that developed symbolic communication systems ground symbols to the world can also help explain how iconic and indexical communication systems underwrote the generation (...) of symbols in the first place. And the third claim is that contemporary accounts about the origins of symbolic communication would benefit from keeping in mind the differences between resemblance arbitrariness, alternative resemblance, and acquisition resemblance as each is exemplified by icons, indexes, and symbols. (shrink)

Democratic societies tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when the security of its citizens is jeopardized or its institutions of liberty are imperiled. Similarly, universities tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when threatened by weaponized intolerance advocates who disenfranchise and denigrate community members and imperil academic norms and professional standards of conduct. Then, just as democratic societies must protect their threatened citizens and safeguard their imperiled institutions of liberty, so universities must protect their threatened community members (...) and safeguard their imperiled norms and standards. I argue for these conclusions by establishing a conflict between what the First Amendment legally permits university community members to express and what the norms of the university and the professional standards that structure academic freedom require from university community members. I argue that given the First Amendment, universities are legally obliged to tolerate even weaponized intolerance in campus public forums even if not in the classroom. I then recommend three responses to weaponized intolerance on campus that are consistent with the First Amendment: denunciation and protest, provision of safe space, and affirmation of academic values, norms, and standards. I reject three frequently encountered responses to weaponized intolerance as inconsistent with the First Amendment: heckler’s vetoes, student speech codes, and speaker bans. And I argue that one response—disruptive protest that falls short of a heckler’s veto—is legally permissible for students and faculty members but is ruled out for faculty members by academic norms and professional standards. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Ronald Lehrer's "Perspectivism and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy". Lehrer treats Nietzsche as promoting only a modest perspectivism according to which different cognitive strategies triangulate the truth. We argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism is much more radical, and defensible, than Lehrer admits. We also suggest that Nietzsche's bundle theory of the self has important implications for psychotherapy and the concept of mental health. According to this theory, the self is an aggregate of ever-changing drives and affects. The conditions (...) of health for such persons are similarly mutable, with no one standard applicable to all persons, or even to the same person over time. (shrink)

On the Genealogy of Morality (GM hereafter) analyzes an enormous range of topics. Its pacing is erratic, shifting instantaneously from patient strolls through arcane scholarly topics to breathless gallops through large intellectual districts at such high speed that attending to any one topic is nearly impossible. It refers to obscure 18th and 19th century intellectuals most 21st century readers have never heard of, along with figures from the ancient world many readers will only have heard of in other contexts, and (...) even some figures many of us are likely to think should not be mentioned in a book of philosophy. Despite these challenges and difficulties, GM is expansive, enlightening, entertaining, probing, and devastating. (shrink)

The underdetermination of intentional explanation by motor behavior complicates inferences drawn from preserved artifacts in the archaeological record to intentions in their production. Without knowledge of a producer's intentions, inferences drawn from those intentions to required cognitive abilities for having those intentions is also complicated.

On the Genealogy of Morality (GM hereafter) analyzes an enormous range of topics. Its pacing is erratic, shifting instantaneously from patient strolls through arcane scholarly topics to breathless gallops through large intellectual districts at such high speed that attending to any one topic is nearly impossible. It refers to obscure 18th and 19th century intellectuals most 21st century readers have never heard of, along with figures from the ancient world many readers will only have heard of in other contexts, and (...) even some figures many of us are likely to think should not be mentioned in a book of philosophy. Despite these challenges and difficulties, GM is expansive, enlightening, entertaining, probing, and devastating. (shrink)

This introduction to these and many of the other problems posed by consciousness discusses the most important work of cognitive science, neurophysiology and philosophy of the past thirty years and presents an up-to-date assessment of the issues and debates. CONTENTS: Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: problems of consciousness 1. Refection on consciousness before the mid-twentieth century 2. Functional neuroanatomy 3. Primate neuropsychology 4. Human evolution 5. Contemporary neuropsychology 6. Neuropsychology of consciousness 7. Philosophy of mind and consciousness 8. Reduction and non-reduction (...) 9. Emergence 10. Prospects for neural theories of consciousness Notes Bibliography Index. (shrink)