Allison Merrick

We are, as Nietzsche tells us in the Preface to GM, “strangers to ourselves” (GM P:1). The particular shape of this self-estrangement is not, as Nietzsche makes plain, the product of simple neglect; nor is it the result of some lack of ability or competence. Indeed, in Nietzsche’s view, the very disciplines of philosophy, history, and psychology, for example, show us that we are at once eager and capable when it comes to taking ourselves as objects of inquiry. Hence, the aspect of self-estrangement that worries Nietzsche is that the very conceptual and moral framework through which we orient ourselves practically, and through which we measure our praise and blame, remains, itself, stubbornly out of view. Until we... Read More.

How are we to understand Nietzsche’s championing of forgetting? Does Nietzsche consider unreconstructed forgetting an ethical and political ideal? If so, does Nietzsche’s counsel on forgetting thereby support and work at the behest of the dominant system of evaluation? Is, to frame it another way, Nietzschean forgetting but a mechanism by which the dominant evaluative framework repeats, reinscribes, retrenches, or otherwise reaffirms itself? By offering a close reading his remarks, most notably those that appear in On the Genealogy of Morality, I aim in this paper to contest the view that Nietzsche’s account of forgetting seeks to silence historical hurts and is, thereby, as ethically problematic as it is politically objectionable. By attending to and reconstructing key passages where Nietzsche’s view comes out most clearly, I demonstrate, contra the dominant account, that Nietzschean forgetting offers us important conceptual resources that can be used to combat any dominant moral evaluative framework.

It is commonplace to note that there are distinctive questions to be found in the domain of political philosophy, queries as to how or why the state and society emerge or about how power should be exercised in society. Yet whether Nietzsche has a set of cogent answers to these sorts of questions is, of course, a contested matter. Jeffrey Metzger's The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche's Genealogy: From Chaos to Conscience answers in the affirmative. In offering a detailed and section-by-section reading of the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Metzger argues that Nietzsche offers a vision of the origins of political life that, at once, is of primary importance in understanding Nietzsche's moral...

In section 24 of The Antichrist, Nietzsche notes a problem namely “the origin of Christianity.” He offers two propositions toward its solution: the first is that “Christianity can only be understood on the soil where it grew:” and the second is that “the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable, but it had to assume a completely degenerate form (simultaneously mutilated and full of alien features) before it came to be used as a redeemer of humanity” (A 24). Significantly this passage suggests that the origins of Christianity rest on a reinterpretation of the type of the redeemer. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of such a modification and to identify some of its key ramifications. After clarifying the type, the paper argues that the type, thus understood, serves as a link between the texts On the Genealogy of Morality and The Antichrist and, as such, reveals the connection between Nietzsche's genealogical methods and the wider project of reevaluation. Though this reading is not the standard interpretive strategy, the paper argues that it is the strategy that Nietzsche himself recommends.

Allison Merrick elucidates the features of ressentiment by examining its structure. In so doing she aims to clarify its conceptual form. Regarding the usual emphasis upon the affliction’s psychological structures she argues that “more attention must be paid to the social conditions that engender ressentiment.” The ascetic priest’s redirection of ressentiment, which served to alleviate the suffering that the slaves’ inadequacy caused them while providing them with a way of denying their deficiency, points to ressentiment’s physiological origin. Merrick’s exposition of the structure of ressentiment offers a more complete account of the concept and indicates how it may be overcome.

Responding to research indicating unsettling results with regard to the ability of University students to recognize and reflect on questions of morality, this paper aims to discuss these issues and to introduce a promising mode of ethics instruction for overcoming such challenges. The Curricular Ethics Bowl (CEB) is a method of ethics education and assessment for a wide range of students and is a descendent of the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB) (Merrick et al., “Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl”). We seek in this article to show the similarities of CEB to MEB and to distinguish this model from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (Landenson 2001). The CEB institutionalizes this mode of ethics education at the program, rather than at the individual course level, and shows advantages over other ethics curricula.

In a well-known passage of the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche makes audible a “new demand”: namely, that “we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must be called into question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they changed and evolved”.1 Here Nietzsche is relatively clear. We need an understanding of the historical conditions under which our moral values have changed in order to call into question the value of our moral values and to subject such valuations to critique. Less obvious, however, is what Nietzsche’s methodology contributes to such a critique of morality and how...

Responding to research indicating unsettling results with regard to the ability of University students to recognize and reflect on questions of morality, this paper aims to discuss these issues and to introduce a promising mode of ethics instruction for overcoming such challenges. The Curricular Ethics Bowl (CEB) is a method of ethics education and assessment for a wide range of students and is a descendent of the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB) (Merrick et al., “Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl”). We seek in this article to show the similarities of CEB to MEB and to distinguish this model from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (Landenson 2001). The CEB institutionalizes this mode of ethics education at the program, rather than at the individual course level, and shows advantages over other ethics curricula.

The subject of this thesis is Friedrich Nietzsche’s methodology, the genealogical mode of inquiry, which came to fruition in On the Genealogy of Morals. The precise nature of the genealogy, as a mode of inquiry, is a site of contest amongst scholars, with the central debates pivoting around four questions which arise upon considering the methodology: what is the critical import of Nietzsche’s genealogical mode of inquiry? What form of critique does it take? To whom does Nietzsche address his reflections? And what role, if any, does history play in Nietzsche’s genealogical narratives? Accordingly, this thesis seeks to offer and to defend answers to the central questions that are generated by the consideration of Nietzsche’s methodology. In order to get a foothold into these debates and to provide the boundary within which these disagreements occur the first chapter has as its object of inquiry an examination and evaluation of Nietzsche scholars’ responses to these issues. In chapter two I defend my interpretation against these rival views, and contend that the genealogy takes the form of an immanent critique, and that it is intended, at least, to reach all of Nietzsche’s contemporaries. The adage “genealogy is history correctly practiced” is treated in the remaining three chapters, in which I attempt to morph what appears to be at present an uninformative formulation into an informative one by arguing that for Nietzsche historiography is best seen as a form of artistry. And, this I submit, serves to shed light upon the genealogical mode of inquiry, and to shape the boundary by which the equation of genealogy as methodology with history becomes instructive

Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This paper discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics Bowl. Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula.

Prognostication has something of a rich and distinguished history. Hippocrates, for instance, suggests that “the best physician is the one who has the providence to tell to the patients according to his knowledge the present situation, what has happened before, and what is going to happen in the future”. In Hippocrates’s estimation, the truly exceptional physician is one who is able to forecast competently the outcome of a disease or other medical condition and effectively communicate that information to the patient or the patient’s proxy.In addition to influencing therapeutic decisions, an accurate and honest prognosis may serve to manage patients’ expectations and facilitate a frank..