•  367
    The eternal recurrence
    Philosophical Review 89 (3): 331-356. 1980.
  •  292
    XII-The Good of Friendship
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (3pt3): 267-294. 2010.
    Problems with representing friendship in painting and the novel and its more successful displays in drama reflect the fact that friends seldom act as inspiringly as traditional images of the relationship suggest: friends' activities are often trivial, commonplace and boring, sometimes even criminal. Despite all that, the philosophical tradition has generally considered friendship a moral good. I argue that it is not a moral good, but a good nonetheless. It provides opportunities to try different…Read more
  •  273
    Plato and the Mass Media
    The Monist 71 (2): 214-234. 1988.
  •  203
    Self-Predication and Plato's Theory of Forms
    American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (2). 1979.
    This paper offers an interpretation of self-Predication (the idea that justice is just) in plato, Given that self-Predication is accepted as obvious both by plato and by his audience, Which entails that "all" self-Predications are clearly, Though not trivially, True. More strongly, It is suggested that "only" self-Predications can be accepted as clearly true by plato. This is to deny that plato had at his disposal an articulated notion of predication, And his middle theory of forms, Primarily th…Read more
  •  201
    How one becomes what one is
    Philosophical Review 92 (3): 385-417. 1983.
  •  186
    What an Author Is
    Journal of Philosophy 83 (11): 685-691. 1986.
  •  177
    Plato on the Imperfection of the Sensible World
    American Philosophical Quarterly 12 (2). 1975.
  •  164
    Nietzsche, life as literature
    Harvard University Press. 1985.
    Argues that Nietzsche tried to create a specific literary character in his writings and discusses the paradoxes of his work
  •  132
    Virtues of Authenticity, Essays on Plato and Socrates (review)
    Philosophical Inquiry 32 (1-2): 127-130. 2010.
    The eminent philosopher and classical scholar Alexander Nehamas presents here a collection of his most important essays on Plato and Socrates. The papers are unified in theme by the idea that Plato's central philosophical concern in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics was to distinguish the authentic from the fake, the original from its imitations. In approach, the collection displays Nehamas's characteristic combination of analytical rigor and sensitivity to the literary form and dramatic effec…Read more
  •  128
    The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal
    Critical Inquiry 8 (1): 133-149. 1981.
    The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its compos…Read more
  •  127
    It is said that when Socrates is made to ask questions like "What is the pious and what the impious?", "What is courage?", or "What is the beautiful?", he is asking for the definition of a universal. For the "average" Greek of his time, however, this is a radically new question about a radically new sort of object, and Socrates’ interlocutors do not understand it. They usually answer it as if it were a different, if related, question: they tend to provide concrete instances of the universal in q…Read more
  •  110
    Did Nietzsche hold a “Falsification Thesis”?
    Philosophical Inquiry 39 (1): 222-236. 2015.
  •  106
    Predication and Forms of Opposites in the "Phaedo"
    Review of Metaphysics 26 (3). 1973.
    The Phaedo, despite the central role which the theory of Forms occupies there, gives us little explicit information. We meet with stock examples and with generalizations like "everything which belongs to being", "everything to which we give the mark of ‘that which is’ in our discussions", "all this sort of being". Socrates postulates the existence of the beautiful itself, the good itself, the large itself, and "all the rest", and he explains the beauty of beautiful things by appealing to their p…Read more
  •  97
    Nietzsche on Truth and the Value of Falsehood
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (3): 319-346. 2017.
    Nietzsche often gives the impression that all human beliefs are false. Some scholars, like Maudemarie Clark, believe that such a “falsification thesis” is unacceptable and try to limit Nietzsche's commitment to it, claiming that he abandons it in his very last works. Others, like Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain, take it in ways that make it true and locate it in all. I argue that the view that is common to both approaches—that Nietzsche held that thesis in the first place—is unjustified. To t…Read more
  •  90
    Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics
    In David J. Furley & Alexander Nehamas (eds.), Aristotle's Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, Princeton University Press. pp. 257-282. 2015.
  •  84
    Nietzsche and “Hitler”
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (S1): 1-17. 1999.
  •  84
    Richard Shusterman on pleasure and aesthetic experience
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1): 49-51. 1998.
  •  83
    Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connection…Read more
  •  77
    Wisdom Without Knowledge
    Philosophical Inquiry 26 (4): 1-7. 2004.
  •  68
    ABSTRACT In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsche's “drives.” They are not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the subject and try to get the rest to follow their lead. Such “subjugation,” whether within one or between different persons, often results not in the other's destruction but in its improvem…Read more
  •  68
    Participation and Predication in Plato's Later Thought
    Review of Metaphysics 36 (2). 1982.
    ONE of the central characteristics of Plato's later metaphysics is his view that Forms can participate in other Forms. At least part of what the Sophist demonstrates is that though not every Form participates in every other, every Form participates in some Forms, and that there are some Forms in which all Forms participate. This paper considers some of the reasons for this development, and some of the issues raised by it.
  •  65
    Reply to Korsmeyer and Gaut
    British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2): 205-207. 2010.
    (No abstract is available for this citation)
  •  61
    Nietzsche as self-made man
    Philosophy and Literature 20 (2): 487-491. 1996.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche as Self-Made ManAlexander NehamasComposing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, by Graham Parkes; xiv & 481 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.I cannot resist beginning this essay on Graham Parkes’s study of Nietzsche’s psychology with the first-person pronoun. Parkes provides an erudite and suggestive presentation of Nietzsche’s views on the soul, according to which what we c…Read more
  •  60
    Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2). 2004.
  •  59
    Is Living an Art that Can be Taught?
    Journal of Philosophical Research 40 (Supplement): 81-91. 2015.
    Along with our inordinate emphasis on managing our lives on the basis of impartial principles and rules, we have lost the sense that some of the greatest human achievements are accomplished precisely by going beyond anything that existing rules and principles allow. Along with our fixation on the values of morality and politics, which apply to everyone on the basis of our similarities to one another, we have lost the sense that there are also values that depend on our differences and distinguish…Read more
  •  59
    Nietzsche, intention, action
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 685-701. 2018.
    Nietzsche sometimes writes as if we are not in control—at least not in conscious control—of our actions. He seems to suggest that what we actually do is independent of our intentions. It turns out, though, that his understanding of both intention and action differs radically from most contemporary treatments of the issue. In particular, he denies that our actions are caused by their intentions, whose role is hermeneutical in a sense that this essay develops. How then is responsibility to be assi…Read more