-
75Ethical thought in the nineteenth centuryIn Michael Forster & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2015.At the close of the eighteenth century, Kant attempts to anchor morality in freedom. A series of nineteenth-century thinkers, though impressed with the claim that there is an essential connection between morality and freedom, argue that Kant has misunderstood the nature of the self, agency, freedom, the individual, the social, the natural sciences, and philosophical psychology. I trace the way in which a series of central figures rethink the connection between morality and freedom by complicat…Read more
-
132Value, Affect, and DriveIn Peter Kail & Manuel Dries (eds.), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature, Oxford University Press. 2016.Nietzsche associates values with affects and drives: he not only claims that values are explained by drives and affects, but sometimes appears to identify values with drives and affects. This is decidedly odd: the agent's reflectively endorsed ends, principles, commitments--what we would think of as the agent's values--seem not only distinct from, but often in conflict with, the agent's drives. Consequently, it is unclear how we should understand Nietzsche's concept of value. This essay attem…Read more
-
162Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for EthicsJournal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2): 297-314. 2013.Near the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). This raises a number of questions. What are these “fundamental problems” that psychology helps us to answer? How exactly does psychology bear on philosophy? In this conference paper, I provide a partial answer to these questions by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche’s account of value. I argue that Nietzsche’s ethical theory is based…Read more
-
429Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean Version of ConstitutivismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 620-660. 2011.This paper has two goals. First, I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s puzzling claims about will to power. I argue that the will to power thesis is a version of constitutivism. Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of agency; in particular, constitutivism rests on the idea that all actions are motivated by a common, higher-order aim, whose presence generates a standard of assessment for actions. Nietzsche’s version of co…Read more
-
1025Nietzsche's Account of Self-Conscious AgencyIn Constantine Sandis (ed.), Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Davidson, . 2019.An overview of Nietzsche's philosophy of action.
-
221The concept of unified agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and SchillerJournal of the History of Philosophy 49 (1): 87-113. 2011.This paper examines Nietzsche’s concept of unified agency. A widespread consensus has emerged in the secondary literature on three points: (1) Nietzsche’s notion of unity is meant to be an analysis of freedom; (2) unity refers to a relation between the agent’s drives or motivational states; and (3) unity obtains when one drive predominates and imposes order on the other drives. I argue that these claims are philosophically and textually indefensible. In contrast, I argue that (1′) Nietzschean un…Read more
-
199Nietzsche on the Nature of the UnconsciousInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (3): 327-352. 2015.This paper argues that Nietzsche develops a novel and compelling account of the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states: he argues that conscious mental states are those with conceptual content, whereas unconscious mental states are those with nonconceptual content. I show that Nietzsche’s puzzling claim that consciousness is ‘superficial’ and ‘falsifying’ can be given a straightforward explanation if we accept this understanding of the conscious/unconscious distinction. I or…Read more
-
175Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean ConstitutivismOxford University Press UK. 2013.Paul Katsafanas explores how we can justify normative claims such as 'murder is wrong'. He defends an original account of constitutivism--the view that we do so by showing that agents become committed to them in virtue of acting--and resolves philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims.
-
271Fugitive Pleasure and the Meaningful Life: Nietzsche on Nihilism and Higher ValuesJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3): 396--416. 2015.Nietzsche’s discussions of nihilism are meant to bring into view an intriguing pathology of modern culture: that it is unable to sustain "higher values". This paper attempts to make sense of the nature and import of higher values. Higher values are a subset of final values. They are distinguished by their demandingness, susceptibility toward creating tragic conflicts, recruitment of a characteristic set of powerful emotions, perceived import, exclusionary nature, and their tendency to instant…Read more
-
76Review: Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu: Nietzsche and Morality (review)Mind 118 (469): 191-194. 2009.
-
28Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, edited by ChristopherJanaway and SimonRobertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, ix + 262 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-958367-6 hb $75.00 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 21 (S4): 9-14. 2013.
-
636Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical PsychologyIn Kristin Gjesdal (ed.), Debates in Nineteenth Century Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, Routledge. pp. 326-338. 2016.Bernard Williams’ “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology”, replete with provocative and insightful claims, has been extremely influential in Nietzsche scholarship. In the two decades since its publication, much of the most interesting and philosophically sophisticated work on Nietzsche has focused on exactly the topics that Williams addresses: Nietzsche’s moral psychology, his account of action, his naturalistic commitments, and the way in which these topics interact with his critique of tradi…Read more
-
413Autonomy, Character, and Self-UnderstandingIn Iskra Fileva (ed.), Questions of Character, Oxford University Press. 2016.Autonomy, traditionally conceived, is the capacity to direct one’s actions in light of self-given principles or values. Character, traditionally conceived, is the set of unchosen, relatively rigid traits and proclivities that influence, constrain, or determine one’s actions. It’s natural to think that autonomy and character will be in tension with one another. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: while character influences and constrains choice, this poses no problem for autonomy. Howe…Read more
-
21The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the UnconsciousOxford University Press UK. 2016.Paul Katsafanas presents a clear, systematic study of Nietzsche's moral psychology. He analyzes Nietzsche's distinction between conscious and unconscious mental events, explains the nature of a type of motivational state that Nietzsche calls the 'drive', and examines the connection between drives, desires, affects, and values. He explores Nietzsche's account of willing unity of the self, freedom, and the relation of the self to its social and historical context. And he argues that Nietzsche's ac…Read more
-
467Nietzsche's Philosophical PsychologyIn John Richardson & Ken Gemes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. pp. 727-755. 2013.Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche's accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an ac…Read more
-
134Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's 'Genealogy', by Christopher Janaway (review)Mind 122 (486). 2013.
-
2404. Kant and Nietzsche on Self-KnowledgeIn João Constâncio (ed.), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, De Gruyter. pp. 110-130. 2015.Kant recognizes two distinct forms of self-knowledge: introspection, which gives us knowledge of our sensations, and apperception, which is knowledge of our own activities. Both modes of self-knowledge can go astray, and are particularly prone to being distorted be selfish motives; thus, neither is guaranteed to provide us with comprehensive self-knowledge. Nietzsche departs from Kant in arguing that these two modes of self-knowledge (1) are not distinct and (2) are far more limited than Kant a…Read more
-
30Review of Craig Dove, Nietzsche's Ethical Theory: Mind, Self and Responsibility (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (5). 2009.
-
239Nietzsche on Agency and Self-IgnoranceJournal of Nietzsche Studies 43 (1): 5-17. 2012.Nietzsche frequently claims that agents are in some sense ignorant of their own actions. In this conference paper, I ask two questions: what exactly does Nietzsche mean by this claim, and how would the truth of this claim affect philosophical models of agency? I argue that Nietzsche's claim about self-ignorance is intended to draw attention to the fact that there are influences upon reflective episodes of choice that have three features. First, these influences are pervasive, occurring in ever…Read more
-
546The Emergence of the Drive Concept and the Collapse of the Animal/Human DivideIn Peter Adamson & G. Fay Edwards (eds.), Animals: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Oxford University Press. 2018.In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers including Kant and Hegel draw a sharp distinction between the human and the animal. The human is self-conscious, the animal is not; the human has moral worth, the animal does not. By the mid to late nineteenth century, these claims are widely rejected. As scientific and philosophical work on the cognitive and motivational capacities of animals increases in sophistication, many philosophers become suspicious of the idea that ther…Read more
-
2895Constitutivism about Practical ReasonsIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 367-394. 2018.This paper introduces constitutivism about practical reason, which is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. According to this view, action has a certain structural feature – a constitutive aim, principle, or standard – that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to derive normative claims. In short, the authority…Read more
-
210The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel, and NietzscheIn D. Owen & A. Ridley (eds.), Nietzsche, Morality, and the Ethical Tradition, . 2017.Kant and Hegel share a common foundational idea: they believe that the authority of normative claims can be justified only by showing that these norms are self-imposed or autonomous. Yet they develop this idea in strikingly different ways: Kant argues that we can derive specific normative claims from the formal idea of autonomy, whereas Hegel contends that we use the idea of freedom not to derive, but to assess, the specific normative claims ensconced in our social institutions and practices. …Read more
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |