-
Nietzsche and the Morality CriticsIn John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. 2001.
-
28Moral Psychology with NietzscheOxford University Press. 2019.Brian Leiter draws on empirical psychology to defend a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts play almost no significant role in our actions. Nietzsche emerges as not just a great philosopher but a prescient psychologist.
-
62Rorty’s Rejection of PhilosophyAnalyse & Kritik 41 (1): 23-30. 2019.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 asses…Read more
-
134The Truth Is TerribleJournal of Nietzsche Studies 49 (2): 151-173. 2018.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 sublimate…Read more
-
97The innocence of becoming: Nietzsche against guiltInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (1): 70-92. 2019.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’ act…Read more
-
23Nietzsche's Naturalism and Nineteenth-Century BiologyJournal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (1): 71-82. 2017.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 o…Read more
-
22Nietzsche's Metaethics: Against the Privilege ReadingsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 8 (3): 277-297. 2000.
-
1323. Moralities Are a Sign-Language of the AffectsIn João Constâncio (ed.), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, De Gruyter. pp. 574-596. 2015.
-
Nietzsche and the Critique of Morality: Philosophical Naturalism in Nietzsche's Theory of ValueDissertation, University of Michigan. 1995.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…Read more
-
3The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and FreudIn The Future for Philosophy, Clarendon Press. 2004.
-
2Is there an american furisprudence?Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 17 (2): 367-387. 1997.BRIAN LEITER; Is There An ‘American’ Jurisprudence?, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 17, Issue 2, 1 July 1997, Pages 367–387, https://doi.org/10.1093/oj.
-
107Naturalizing jurisprudenceIn John R. Shook & Paul Kurtz (eds.), The future of naturalism, Humanity Books. 2009.General jurisprudence-that branch of legal philosophy concerned with the nature of law and adjudication-has been relatively unaffected by the "naturalistic" strains so evident, for example, in the epistemology, philosophy of mind and moral philosophy of the past forty years. This paper sketches three ways in which naturalism might affect jurisprudential inquiry. The paper serves as a kind of precis of the main themes in my book NATURALIZING JURISPRUDENCE: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN LEGAL REALISM AND NAT…Read more
-
112The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2007.This Handbook will be an essential reference point for graduate students and professional academics working on continental philosophy, as well as those with an ...
-
241Morality in the pejorative sense: On the logic of Nietzsche's critique of moralityBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 3 (1). 1995.(1995). Morality in the pejorative sense: On the logic of Nietzsche's critique of morality. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 113-145
-
1Legal Realism, Hard Positivism, and Limits of Conceptual AnalysisIn Jules L. Coleman (ed.), Hart's Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to `the Concept of Law', Oxford University Press. 2001.
-
48Ronald Dworkin describes an approach to how courts should decide cases that he associates with Judge Richard Posner as a Chicago School of anti-theoretical, no-nonsense jurisprudence. Since Professor Dworkin takes his own view of adjudication to be diametrically opposed to that of the Chicago School, it might seem fair, then, to describe Dworkin's own theory as an instance of pro-theoretical, nonsense jurisprudence. That characterization is not one, needless to say, that Professor Dworkin welcom…Read more
-
94Why Tolerate Religion?Princeton University Press. 2012."--Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton University "This is a provocative and bracing essay, one that is bound to stimulate much discussion.
-
37The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in NietzscheIn John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. 2001.
-
6Closet Dualism and Mental CausationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 161-181. 1998.Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental cau…Read more
-
138
-
University of ChicagoRegular Faculty
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
19th Century Philosophy |