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91Agency 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.
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272Fugitive 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
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76Review: Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu: Nietzsche and Morality (review)Mind 118 (469): 191-194. 2009.
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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.
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648Naturalism, 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. 2015.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
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419Autonomy, Character, and Self-UnderstandingIn Iskra Fileva (ed.), Questions of Character, Oxford University Press Usa. 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
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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
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469Nietzsche's Philosophical PsychologyIn Ken Gemes & John Richardson (eds.), The 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
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135Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's 'Genealogy', by Christopher Janaway (review)Mind 122 (486). 2013.
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2414. 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
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30Review of Craig Dove, Nietzsche's Ethical Theory: Mind, Self and Responsibility (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (5). 2009.
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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
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552The 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
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2965Constitutivism 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
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211The 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
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351On Homuncular Drives and the Structure of the Nietzschean SelfJournal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (1): 1-11. 2014.If Clark and Dudrick have their way, gone will be the days of breezy writings on Nietzsche that recruit a phrase from here, a paragraph from there, and construct an interpretation from the resultant mélange. Clark and Dudrick advocate a meticulous, line-by-line study of Nietzsche’s text, with painstaking attention not only to the broader context of his claims, but even to the precise intent of the images and metaphors that he employs. Here, we find a level of textual scrutiny and careful conside…Read more
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255Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective AgencyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185-216. 2012.Kant and Nietzsche are typically thought to have diametrically opposed accounts of willing: put simply, whereas Kant gives signal importance to reflective episodes of choice, Nietzsche seems to deny that reflective choices have any significant role in the etiology of human action. In this essay, I argue that the dispute between Kant and Nietzsche actually takes a far more interesting form. Nietzsche is not merely rejecting the Kantian picture of agency. Rather, Nietzsche is offering a subtle cri…Read more
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457Routledge Philosophical Minds: The Nietzschean MindRoutledge. 2018.28 essays on all aspects of Nietzsche's thought. The attached file contains the introduction and table of contents.
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295The Relevance of History for Moral Philosophy: A Study of Nietzsche's GenealogyIn Simon May (ed.), Nietzsche's on the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2011.The Genealogy takes a historical form. But does the history play an essential role in Nietzsche's critique of modern morality? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. The Genealogy employs history in order to show that acceptance of modern morality was causally responsible for producing a dramatic change in our affects, drives, and perceptions. This change led agents to perceive actual increases in power as reductions in power, and actual decreases in power as increases in power. Moreover…Read more
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75Ethical thought in the nineteenth centuryIn Michael N. Forster & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, 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
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Areas of Specialization
Moral Psychology |
19th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Moral Psychology |
19th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |