Christopher Janaway

Plato's writings about the arts play a foundational role in the history of aesthetics, not simply because they are the earliest substantial contribution to the subject. The arts are a central, rather than a marginal topic for Plato, and for him the whole of culture must reflect and inculcate the values that concern him. His philosophy of art (as we would call it) is closely integrated with his metaphysics, ethics and politics. We shall examine in outline the major issues that a reading of Plato is likely to raise for modern aesthetics.

The essay draws attention to some of the different uses made of Schopenhauer throughout Nietzsche's writings. Different roles for Schopenhauer coexist at all stages of Nietzsche's writing. He functions as an exemplar for European culture, but at the same time Nietzsche can find serious fault with his philosophical doctrines, as he does in early unpublished notes. In later writings Schopenhauer is assigned the role of Nietzsche's antipode, but even then Schopenhauer is paid the compliment of being Nietzsche's great and only teacher. The essay includes a commentary on Genealogy III:12 in which Nietzsche's conception of 'perspectival knowledge' is anti-Schopenhauerian, but can only be seen for what it is once an underlying Schopenhauerian structure is made explicit.

Nietzsche vehemently attacks the traditional conception of the unitary self. This essay tries to show that some of the undermining of that conception had already been done in Schopenhauer’s work. We should not ignore the obvious fact that while Nietzsche is a philosopher of cultures, classes and epochs, Schopenhauer’s view of knowledge and ethics remains firmly ahistorical. 1 Nevertheless, if we first try to inhabit Schopenhauer’s point of view, we can look forward to Nietzsche and illuminate him from one (partial) perspective. 2 For Nietzsche’s opposition to Schopenhauer’s conceptions of the subject and of the will is interwoven with more positive debts to his predecessor’s philosophy, and he by no means fully overcomes its problems and tensions.

[Ken Gemes] In some texts Nietzsche vehemently denies the possibility of free will; in others he seems to positively countenance its existence. This paper distinguishes two different notions of free will. Agency free will is intrinsically tied to the question of agency, what constitutes an action as opposed to a mere doing. Deserts free will is intrinsically tied to the question of desert, of who does and does not merit punishment and reward. It is shown that we can render Nietzsche's prima facie conflicting assertions regarding free will compatible by interpreting him as rejecting deserts free will while accepting the possibility of agency free will. It is argued that Nietzsche's advances an original form of compatibilism which takes agency free will to be a rare achievement rather than a natural endowment. /// [Christopher Janaway] This paper aims to distinguish a conception of 'free will' that Nietzsche opposes and one that he supports. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche propounds the 'total unfreedom' of the will. But by the time of Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy he is more concerned to trace the affective psychological states underlying beliefs in both free will and 'unfree will', to suggest that the will might become free in certain individuals, a matter of having a consistent strong character, self-knowledge, and ability to create values. The paper explores the kind of autonomy required in agents who would 'revalue' existing values.

This original new book argues for a reassessment of Plato's challenge to the arts. Plato was the first great figure in Western philosophy to assess the value of the arts; he argued in the Republic that traditionally accepted forms of poetry, drama, and music are unsound. While this view has been widely rejected, Janaway argues that Plato's hostile case is a more coherent and profound challenge to the arts than has sometimes been supposed. Denying that Plato advocates "good art" in any modern sense, Janaway seeks both to understand Plato's critique in the context of his own philosophy and to locate him in today's philosophy of art, showing how issues in aesthetics arise from responses to his charges.

This paper elucidates and interrogates Schopenhauer’s notion of will and its relation to ideas about the unconscious, with the aim of addressing its significance as an exercise in philosophical psychology. Schopenhauer aims at a global metaphysics, a theory of the essence of the world as it is in itself. He calls this essence will (Wille), which, to put it briefly, he understands as a blind striving for existence, life, and reproduction. Human beings have the same essence as all other manifestations of will in the world, and this has several consequences for Schopenhauer's conception of humanity. Neither rationality, nor intentional action, nor consciousness is primary or foundational in human beings. The true core of the personality is not the self-conscious ‘I’ or subject of knowledge, but rather the will, which is fundamentally blind and without knowledge, but which interacts with the intellect almost as an agent distinct from it. Schopenhauer makes a number of psychological observations about the interplay of intellect and will. These include the omnipresence of sexual desire in or beneath our experience; the persistence of desires and affects unknown to the self-conscious intellect; the will's capacity to prohibit representations in the intellect that are liable to arouse certain emotions; and the occurrence of madness when memories painful to the will are shielded from the intellect and arbitrary representations are substituted.