Brian Leiter

I argue that the real puzzle about Richard Rorty’s intellectual development is not why he gave up on ‘analytic’ philosophy-he had never been much committed to that research agenda, even before it became moribund-but why, beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), he gave up on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity. In addition to Rorty’s published works, I draw on biographical information about Rorty’s undergraduate and graduate education to support this assessment, and contrast his rejection of philosophy with Nietzsche’s. Many contemporary philosophers influenced by Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and Sellars’ attack on ‘the Myth of the Given’ (the two argumentative linchpins of PMN) did not abandon philosophical questions about truth, knowledge, and mind, they just concluded those questions needed to be naturalized, to be answered in conjunction with the empirical sciences. Why didn’t Rorty go this route? The paper concludes with some interesting anecdotes about Rorty that invite speculative explanations.

The “terrible” existential truths about the human situation raise Schopenhauer's question: why continue living at all? Nietzsche's answer is that only viewed in terms of aesthetic values can life itself be “justified”. But how could the fact that life exemplifies aesthetic value restore our attachment to life in the face of these terrible existential truths? I suggest that there are two keys to understanding Nietzsche's answer: first, his assimilation of aesthetic pleasure to a kind of sublimated sexual pleasure; and second, his psychological thesis that powerful affects neutralize pain, and thus can “seduce” the sufferer back to life. Life can supply the requisite kind of aesthetic pleasure only if it features what I call the “spectacle of genius,” the spectacle represented by the likes of Beethoven, Goethe, and Napoleon. Since such geniuses are not possible in a culture dominated by “morality”, the critique of morality is essential to the restoration of an affective attachment to life.

ABSTRACTI offer an interpretation of Nietzsche's striking idea of ‘the innocence of becoming’, and a partial defense of its import, namely, that no one is ever morally responsible or guilty for what they do and that many of the so-called reactive attitudes are misplaced. I focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the arguments as set out in Twilight of the Idols. First, there is Nietzsche's hypothesis, partly psychological and partly historical or anthropological, that the ideas of ‘free’ action or free will, and of responsibility for actions freely chosen or willed, were introduced primarily in order to justify punishment. Call this the Genetic Thesis about Free Will. Second, there is Nietzsche's claim that the moral psychology, or ‘psychology of the will” as he calls it, that underlies this picture is, in fact, false – that, in fact, it is not true that every action is willed or that it reflects a purpose or that it originates in consciousness. Call these, in aggregate, the Descriptive Thesis about the Will. Finally, there is articulation of a programmatic agenda, namely, to restore the ‘innocence of becoming’ by getting rid of guilt and punishment based on guilt – not primarily because ascriptions of guilt and responsibility are false, but because a world understood as ‘innocent’, one understood in terms of ‘natural’ cause and effect, is a better world in which to live. I focus in particular on a reactive attitude often ignored by philosophers, but of crucial importance for Nietzsche, namely, revenge. I aim to explain and defend Zarathustra's recommendation: ‘Enemy’ you shall say, but not villain; sick you shall say, but not scoundrel; fool you shall say, but not ‘sinner.’ Nietzsche's views are contrasted with those of important modern writers on these topics, especially P.F. Strawson and Derk Pereboom.

Christian Emden has written an informative if sometimes philosophically frustrating book about Nietzsche’s engagement with both neo-Kantian philosophers 1 and the life sciences from the 1840s onward. Emden documents the preceding with an eye to shedding light not only on Nietzsche’s naturalism, on “what does it mean to ‘translate humanity back into nature’” as Nietzsche put it in BGE, but also on what Emden calls “the problem of normativity,” variously stated as how to “obtain an understanding of the sources of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects...

In Chapters I-III, I argue that Nietzsche is a critic of "morality" in the sense of any system of values that has one or both of the following features: it presupposes the truth of certain descriptive claims about human agency, in the sense that for the evaluative categories to be intelligibly applied to persons these claims must be true ; it favors the interests of the "lowest" at the expense of the "highest" men, the embodiments of human excellence. I illustrate, in particular, how this latter component of "morality" informs the attack on all Nietzsche's seemingly disparate targets : in each case, Nietzsche shows that such norms are inhospitable to the realization of human excellence. Nietzsche's critique is distinguished from recent critical work in analytic ethics : the former is concerned with the real effects of morality on the cultural conditions necessary for the flourishing of human greatness, while the latter writers are only concerned with the inability of philosophical theories of morality to find conceptual space for our various mundane personal projects. ;Chapters IV-VI address the metaethical question implicit in Nietzsche's "revaluation of values": what is the status of the values Nietzsche relies on in criticizing morality? I argue that: Nietzsche is a type of realist about judgments of prudential value ; and Nietzsche is an anti-realist about judgments of non-prudential value . In considering Nietzsche's arguments for , particular attention is accorded the neglected influence of the German materialism of the 1850s and 60s. I argue that Nietzsche embraces a "naturalistic" conception of persons , which leads him to think that judgments of non-prudential value can be "explained away" in terms of psychological and physiological facts about persons

Marx did not have a normative theory, that is, a theory that purported to justify, discursively and systematically, his normative opinions, to show them to be rationally obligatory or objectively valid. In this regard, Marx was obviously not alone: almost everyone, including those who lead what are widely regarded as exemplary ‘moral’ lives, decide and act on the basis of normative intuitions and inclinations that fall far short of a theory. Yet self-proclaimed Marxists like G. A. Cohen and Jurgen Habermas have reintroduced a kind of normative theory into the Marxian tradition that Marx himself would have ridiculed. This essay defends Marx’s position and tries to explain the collapse of Western Marxism into bourgeois practical philosophy, i.e., philosophizing about what ought to be done that is unthreatening to capitalist relations of production.

The essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of the will, focusing on (1) Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of “willing” an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will; (2) Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally connected to the resulting action (at least not in a way sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and (3) Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis of action. Particular attention is given to passages from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and a revised version of my earlier account of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism is defended. Finally, recent work in empirical psychology (Libet, Wegner) is shown to support Nietzsche’s skepticism that our “feeling” of will is a reliable guide to the causation of action

Introduction: From legal realism to naturalized jurisprudence -- A note on legal indeterminacy -- Part I. American legal realism and its critics -- Rethinking legal realism: toward a naturalized jurisprudence (1997) -- Legal realism and legal positivism reconsidered (2001) -- Is there an "American" jurisprudence? (1997) -- Postscript to Part I: Interpreting legal realism -- Part II. Ways of naturalizing jurisprudence -- Legal realism, hard positivism, and the limits of conceptual analysis (1998, 2001) -- Why Quine is not a postmodernist (1997) -- Beyond the Hart/Dworkin debate: the methodology problem in jurisprudence (2003) -- Part III. Naturalism, morality, and objectivity -- Moral facts and best explanations (2001) -- Objectivity, morality, and adjudication (2001) -- Law and objectivity (2002).

This essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to Nietzsche, as I reconstruct his view, moral judgments result from the interaction of two kinds of affective responses: first, a “basic affect” of inclination toward or aversion from certain acts, and then a further affective response to that basic affect. I argue that Nietzsche views basic affects asnoncognitive, that is, as identifiable solely by how they feel to the subject who experiences the affect. By contrast, I suggest that meta-affects sometimes incorporate acognitivecomponent like belief. After showing how this account of moral judgment comports with a reading of Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I have offered in previous work, I conclude by adducing philosophical and empirical psychological reasons for thinking that Nietzsche's account of moral judgment is correct.