Christopher Janaway

Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners, Second Edition, provides a unique approach to reading philosophy, requiring students to engage with material as they read. It contains carefully selected texts, commentaries on those texts, and questions for the reader to think about as she reads. It serves as starting points for both classroom discussion and independent study. The texts cover a wide range of topics drawn from diverse areas of philosophical investigation, ranging over ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and political philosophy. This edition has been updated and expanded. New chapters discuss the moral significance of friendship and love, the subjective nature of consciousness and the ways that science might explore conscious experience. And there are new texts and commentary in chapters on doubt, self and moral dilemmas.

Olga Plümacher (1839–1895) published a book entitled Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in 1884. It was an influential book: Nietzsche owned a copy, and there are clear cases where he borrowed phraseology from Plümacher. Plümacher specifies philosophical pessimism as comprising two propositions: ‘The sum of displeasure outweighs the sum of pleasure’ and ‘Consequently the non-being of the world would be better than its being’. Plümacher cites Schopenhauer as the first proponent of this position, and Eduard von Hartmann as the thinker who has developed it to its fullest potential. She heavily criticizes Schopenhauer in many respects, not for being a pessimist, but rather for not achieving as good a pessimism as he might have done, on the following major grounds: that his account of pleasure as merely privative is implausible, that he has a confused account of individuation, that his retention of a Christian notion of guilt is gratuitous, that he lapses into the self-pitying subjectivity of the condition she calls Weltschmerz, and that his philosophy leads to quietism, and is thus inferior to von Hartmann’s combination of pessimism and optimism, which allows for social progress.

The article argues for the following interpretation of Plato's dialogue Ion. (1) the dialogue is designed primarily to refute Ion's claims to knowledge in his discourse about Homer—i.e. in his role as critic or eulogist of Homer; (2) as regards the rhapsode as performer and as regards the poet, it is especially the fineness of their output that cannot be explained by way of techne; and (3) Plato genuinely assumes the existence of poetic and rhapsodic technai. Points (2) and (3) are compatible. It is merely that excercising a techne is not the basis of artistic success (as we would now call it). The article argues that this reading gives the dialogue greater unity and philosophical plausibility than readings that deny any techne at all to either rhapsode or poet.

First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its significant aspects. It gives a unique and influential account of what is and is not of value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition and the possibility of deliverance from it. This translation of the first volume of what later became a two-volume work reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844 and 1859.

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: 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 editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work.

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer is to offer translations of the best modern German editions of Schopenhauer's work in a uniform format for Schopenhauer scholars, together with philosophical introductions and full editorial apparatus. The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion. This second volume was added to the work in 1844, and revised in 1859. Its chapters are officially 'supplements' to the first volume, but are indispensable for a proper appreciation of Schopenhauer's thought. Here we have his most mature reflections on many topics, including sex, death, conscious and unconscious desires, and the doctrines of salvation and liberation in Christian and Indian thought. Schopenhauer clarifies the nature of his metaphysics of the will, and synthesizes insights from a broad range of literary, scientific and scholarly sources. This new translation reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose, and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names, bibliography, and succinct editorial notes.

The editors of Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity claim with some justification that few philosophers, and even fewer classicists, have "taken the time to understand [Nietzsche] on his own terms as a scholar of antiquity". "Our primary aim," Jensen and Heit say, "is to show not how Nietzsche's earlier works on antiquity help us to understand Nietzsche, but how they may improve our understanding of antiquity." The contributions vary quite widely in style and quality, and I shall suggest that not every contribution to the collection succeeds in that stated primary aim.

Schopenhauer asserts that ‘the will, which is objectified in human life as it is in every appearance, is a striving without aim and without end’. The article rejects some recent readings of this claim, and offers the following positive interpretation: however many specific aims of my specific desires I manage to attain, none is a final aim, in the sense that none terminates my ‘willing as a whole’, none turns me into a non-willing being. To understand Schopenhauer’s claim we must recognize his central contrast between happiness and will-lessness. Happiness is the satisfaction of individual desire, but no act of will that succeeds in satisfying individual desire is the attainment of a final aim, in that none brings about a conscious state in which the subject experiences no more unfulfilled desires. Such a state is the ultimate goal of existence, in Schopenhauer’s view, but happiness does not provide a route along which it can be attained.

Many commentators have said that Nietzsche is concerned, either in all or in some parts of his career, with providing a kind of ‘theodicy,’ or with justifying or finding meaning in suffering. In this article, I examine these notions, questioning whether terms such as ‘theodicy’ or ‘justifying suffering’ are helpful in getting Nietzsche’s views into focus, and exploring some unclarities concerning the way in which such terms themselves are understood. I conclude that, while Nietzsche’s later position is continuous with the tradition of theodicy in seeking to relate suffering’s value to some wider whole, it is also discontinuous with that tradition because it does not hold that suffering as such has a fixed normative value, that suffering as such has a meaning, that it happens for a reason, or that it is justified, let alone that the world’s containing suffering is in line with our interests, or that we ought because of suffering to value our lives one way or another. On Nietzsche’s view there is nothing that guarantees meaning or specific normative value to suffering just because it is suffering. In all these senses Nietzsche has moved away from the tradition of theodicy.

The paper argues on the basis of internal textual evidence that Nietzsche's statement that Essay 3 of On the Genealogy of Morality illustrates an aphorism has hitherto been misinterpreted. The aphorism in question is Section 1 of Essay 3 (which was in fact inserted a late stage of publication); the remainder of Essay 3 is the commentary on it. Those interpreters who have taken the short epigram concerning 'wisdom as a woman' to be the aphorism on which Essay 3 is the commentary have invented theories concerning what Nietzsche means by 'intepretation' that are rendered unnecessary by locating the correct aphorism.

Against the claim that Nietzsche’s early and late views on confronting the truth about human existence differ widely, this article argues that in The Birth of Tragedy tragic art is affirmative of life and not limited to beautifying illusion, while later works still contain the idea that artistic production of beauty is a falsification necessary to make existence bearable for us. Nietzsche did not start with the view that art’s value lies in sheer illusion, nor end with the view that truth should be confronted wholly without illusion, but is ambivalent on this issue throughout

In their recent book The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick claim that Nietzsche takes Plato’s theory of the soul to be ‘a hypothesis, which his own psychology is an attempt to refine’. This essay accepts that claim, but argues for a more streamlined account of the relation between Nietzsche and Plato than Clark and Dudrick give. There is no justification for their suggestion that Nietzsche diagnoses an ‘atomistic need’ as responsible for what he objects to in Plato’s model. The claim that ‘reason’ is a motivationally inert set of cognitive capacities is not necessarily a point of disagreement with Plato. Nietzsche’s psychology does not require a generalized ‘will to value’ as a counterpart to the will to truth. Clark and Dudrick fail to recognize the Platonic soul-elements as drives, and that the element which for Plato should govern in the best of souls can be interpreted as closely analogous to Nietzsche’s will to truth

With the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes essays on method, logic, the intellect, Kant, pantheism, natural science, religion, education, and language. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.