Aaron Ridley

This paper offers an account of Nietzsche's re-evaluation of values that seeks to satisfy two desiderata, both important if Nietzsche's project is to stand a chance of success. The first is that Nietzsche's re-evaluations must be capable of being understood as authoritative by those whose values are subject to re-evaluation. The second is that Nietzsche's project must not falsify the values being re-evaluated, by, for example, misrepresenting intrinsic values as instrumental values. Given this, five possible forms of re-evaluation are distinguished, and, of these, four are argued both to satisfy the specified desiderata and to feature more or less prominently in Nietzsche's later work. The conclusion of the paper is therefore that Nietzsche's project has at least the right general shape to succeed, and that the reasons for this depend upon acknowledging the importance of the desiderata and of the distinctions to which the paper draws attention

Nietzsche claims that we are fated to be as we are. He also claims, however, that we can create ourselves. To many commentators these twin commitments have seemed self-contradictory or paradoxical. The argument of this paper, by contrast, is that, despite appearances, there is no paradox here, nor even a tension between Nietzsche's two claims. Instead, when properly interpreted these claims turn out to be intimately related to one another, so that our fatedness emerges as integral to our capacity to become self-creators. The paper also offers, in the course of undermining a false alternative that is deeply entrenched in the philosophical tradition, a reading of Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati that actually – and perhaps uniquely – makes full sense of section 276 of The Gay Science, the chief source for this aspect of his thought.

Nietzsche is often said to have started out as a Schopenhauerian metaphysician of some kind before leaving Schopenhauer behind him, and, by the end of his sane life, metaphysics too. His first and last thoughts about tragedy, however, sit uneasily with this narrative. The late thoughts are simply too close to the early ones for the story to accommodate them—not for their Schopenhauerianism, but for the strongly metaphysical flavour that they appear to share. The argument of the present paper is that the appearance is veridical, and that attempts to explain away the metaphysical flavour of the later remarks cannot succeed. The paper concludes with a brief diagnosis of why Nietzsche's final thoughts about tragedy, in Twilight of the Idols, so unignorably recall the ones expressed in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art.

The speed with which Bradley became an historical backwater has probably made it easier to think of him as a second-rate philosopher, who was either incompetent or careless, or at any rate uninteresting, and to suppose that his arguments have been refuted as well as rejected. But as far as his metaphysics are concerned this is not the case. His project and his premises are not those of contemporary analytic philosophy, but his arguments are none the less rigorous for that; and attempts to convict him of poor reasoning often redound little to the credit of his critics, as I hope to show. If Bradley is not much read nowadays then the reason is that fashions have changed, rather than that his philosophical shortcomings have been found out.

This anthology is intended as a core text for courses in aesthetics or philosophy of art. It contains a wealth of readings from both classic and contemporary sources, and aims to present substantial selections from those texts rather than mere "snippets." Readings are organized historically within four broad themes so that students can see how concepts of art have evolved and been debated. Each reading is introduced by the authors, who suggest connections between the reading and others in the anthology. Unlike other anthologies on the market, The Philosophy of Art is both comprehensive and affordable, making it the ideal book for course use.

It seems natural to suppose that Artur Schnabel’s occasionally inaccurate performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier would have been even better had it been accurate throughout. In the present paper I defend this supposition against a sceptical argument which purports to show that we have no good reason to believe it. The sceptical argument, which draws on some plausible-seeming thoughts about aesthetic properties, concludes that, because we cannot know whether this or that (as-yet-unachieved) musical result is so much as possible, we have no good reason to suppose that the accurate version of Schnabel’s performance should be preferred to Schnabel’s own. In attempting to defuse this sceptical argument, I open up, and begin to explore, some new and potentially interesting questions about musical creativity and about the species of rationality that it requires and exhibits

Many philosophers have been interested in aesthetics, but Collingwood was passionate about art. His theories were never merely theoretical: aesthetics for him was a vivid, vibrant thing, to be experienced immediately in worked paint and in sculptured stones, in poetry and music. Art and life were no dichotomy for Collingwood - for how could you have one without the other? Works of art were created in and for the real world, to be enjoyed by real people, to enchant to enhance. Aaron Ridley's fascinating introduction opens up the work of this most rewarding of aesthetic thinkers, tracing his thought from its philosophic origins through to its practical consequence and ethical implications. The man who saw art as 'the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind' had a sense of its urgent importance which we ignore at our peril today

Discussion of the relations between ethics and aesthetics has tended to focus on issues concerning judgement: for example, philosophers have often asked whether, or to what extent, ethical considerations of one sort or another should inform aesthetic verdicts. Much less discussed, however, have been the relations between these two domains in their practical aspects. In this paper, I try to defuse a cluster of reasons for believing that practical competence in the ethical domain and practical competence in the aesthetic domain must be understood as importantly, or structurally, distinct from one another.

Beginning Bioethics introduces students to the language of philosophical ethics before leading them in Part Two through six major issues in bioethics. The author gives clear explanations of all sides of a given issue and engages with several major contributions to the debate. This book can stand alone, but was written also to accompany the third edition of Bette-Jane Crigger's Cases in Bioethics, providing the philosophical counterpart to cases discussed there by US medical practitioners. Both books originate with St Martin's Press in the United States.

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This_ GuideBook _introduces and assesses: Nietzsche's life and the background to his writings on art the ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including _The_ _Birth of Tragedy_, _Human, All Too Human_ and _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ Nietzsche's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought. This _GuideBook_ will be essential reading for all students coming to Nietzsche for the first time

The speed with which Bradley became an historical backwater has probably made it easier to think of him as a second-rate philosopher, who was either incompetent or careless, or at any rate uninteresting, and to suppose that his arguments have been refuted as well as rejected. But as far as his metaphysics are concerned this is not the case. His project and his premises are not those of contemporary analytic philosophy, but his arguments are none the less rigorous for that; and attempts to convict him of poor reasoning often redound little to the credit of his critics, as I hope to show. If Bradley is not much read nowadays then the reason is that fashions have changed, rather than that his philosophical shortcomings have been found out.

It seems natural to think that there are aesthetic reasons for action and that an artist must be guided by such reasons as he or she begins work on the canvas or poem or symphony or marble. This latter supposition seems at odds, however, not only with classical inspiration theory but also with the views of one of the last century’s most important philosophers of art, R. G. Collingwood. We propose an account of acting for an aesthetic reason inspired by G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention, specifically by her concept of ‘practical knowledge’, which we believe can accommodate Collingwood’s reservations about the sort of knowledge of their ends, and of the means to those ends, which artists have as they engage in their creative activity.

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead.