Mark Migotti

This paper takes up Nietzsche’s contrast between a relatively enduring ‘drama’ of punishment, which consists in sequences of procedures, and a congeries of often discrepant meanings and purposes of the drama and contrasts it favorably with the distinction between a definition of punishment and a justification for it which received a good deal of attention in the middle of the twentieth century in anglophone philosophical circles. My chief thesis is that the philosophical lesson to be drawn from the widely acknowledge failure of efforts to further the philosophical understanding of punishment by the latter route is Nietzsche’s: that the concept in question and the practices that fall under it are fundamentally insusceptible to ahistorical methods. I argue for the thesis proper in the first section of the paper, and explore consequences of it for our understanding of the connection between punishment and justice in the second.

This dissertation attempts to establish that Nietzsche's philosophical development from 1864 to 1870 is directed towards finding a satisfactory way to redeem the sufferings of life immanently, that is, without appeal to a state of perfect being beyond the grave. I argue that this stage of his thinking culminates in the belief that the project of self-expressive self-determination was a satisfactory source of immanent redemption, and I therefore label this enterprise the project of redemptive self-determination. ;In the first of the dissertation's three parts I show how Nietzsche's confrontation with Schopenhauer's pessimism led him to believe that an acceptable practical philosophy--that is, a set of maxims prescribing or prohibiting the direction of one's energies towards the achievement of certain ends--had to be compatible with atheism and metaphysical pessimism . In part two I explain what redemptive self-determination is and argue for its presence in Nietzsche's thinking during the period covered. And in part three I show how his commitment to redemptive self-determination shaped his views of the promise and purpose of classical philology and the nature and death of Greek tragedy

In Germany, Otfried Höffe has been a leading contributor to debates in moral, legal, political, and social philosophy for close to three decades. Höffe's work, brings into relief the relevance of these German discussions to their counterparts in English-language circles. In this book, originally published in Germany in 1990 and expanded since, Höffe proposes an extended and original interpretation of Kant‚ philosophy of law, and social morality. Höffe articulates his reading of Kant in the context of an account of modernity as a "polyphonous project," in which the dominant themes of pluralism and empiricism are countered by the theme of categorically binding moral principles, such as human rights. Paying equal attention to the nuances of Kant's texts and the character of the philosophical issues in their own right, Höffe ends up with a Kantianism that requires, rather than precludes, a moral anthropology and that questions the fashionable juxtaposition of Kant and Aristotle as exemplars of incompatible approaches to ethical and political thought