Aaron Ridley

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.

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.

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 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

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