•  5
    Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique
    In Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer & Max Pensky (eds.), A Companion to Adorno, Wiley. 2020.
    Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics and social critique are, in turn, very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object o…Read more
  •  2
    This chapter begins with some brief biographical information and some general remarks about Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical methodology and style. Throughout his life, Nietzsche's books had a very small circulation. But by the end of his life, he was beginning to receive greater acclaim, and he was to have an enormous influence, not just within philosophy, but in the wider cultural sphere. In some recent literature on Nietzsche, the divide between naturalism and non‐naturalism has figured pr…Read more
  •  19
    Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 645-647. 2021.
    Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value. By LopesDominic McIver.
  •  9
    At the heart of Bernard Reginster’s thought-provoking book on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality is a new conception of the doctrine of the will to power, and an.
  •  30
    VI—Aesthetic Beautification
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122 (2): 119-139. 2022.
    Aesthetic beautification is a familiar artistic phenomenon. Even as they face death, heroes and heroines in operas still sing glorious music. Characters in Shakespearean tragedies still deliver beautifully eloquent speeches in the throes of despair. Even when depicting suffering and horror, paintings can still remain a transfixing delight for the eyes. In such cases, the work of art represents or expresses something to which we would, in ordinary life, attribute a negative valence, but it does s…Read more
  •  5
    Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (review)
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 51 (2): 288-293. 2020.
  •  35
    The Philosophical Ibsen
    Analysis 82 (2): 396-401. 2022.
  •  26
    Moral Psychology with Nietzsche by Brian Leiter
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 51 (2): 288-293. 2020.
    Brian Leiter's Moral Psychology with Nietzsche draws together seven of his previous papers, expands and updates them, and weaves them together into a unified naturalist line of interpretation. The fundamental positions largely remain the same. The reader already familiar with Leiter's work will thus not be in for major surprises, but will have much to learn from reading the new exegetical and philosophical details in this book.The "moral psychology" indicated in the book's title is construed ver…Read more
  •  16
    Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture: Reply to Critics
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 51 (2): 231-240. 2020.
    ABSTRACT This article was presented in January 2020 to the North American Nietzsche Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting as part of a book symposium on Andrew Huddleston's Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019). Here the author replies to critical commentaries by Kristin Gjesdal and Jacqueline Scott.
  •  831
    Ressentiment
    Ethics 131 (4): 670-696. 2021.
    Nietzsche famously discusses a psychological condition he calls ressentiment, a condition involving toxic, vengeful anger. I offer a free-standing theory in philosophical psychology of the familiar...
  •  51
    Nietzsche's aesthetics
    Philosophy Compass 15 (11): 1-10. 2020.
    We find numerous discussions of art and aesthetics stretching from Nietzsche's first book The Birth of Tragedy to his final books of 1888. In what follows, I seek to give an overview of Nietzsche's views. I proceed in a roughly chronological fashion, but try to group key themes together insofar as possible.
  •  789
    Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique
    In Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer & Maxim Pensky (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Adorno, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
  •  48
    Nietzsche on Art and Life (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3): 592-594. 2015.
  •  70
    Normativity and the Will to Power: Challenges for a Nietzschean Constitutivism
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (3): 435-456. 2016.
    The past decade and a half has seen a considerable flowering of interest in Nietzsche’s metaethics. In this time, Nietzsche has been presented with nearly as wide a range of views in metaethics as there are exegetical options on the table—views ranging from nihilism to subjective realism to expressivism to fictionalism to objective realism to, most recently, constructivism and constitutivism. Interpreters must square Nietzsche’s apparently skeptical remarks about the objectivity of value with hi…Read more
  •  35
    Why (and How) We Read Nietzsche
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49 (2): 233-240. 2018.
    This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point …Read more
  •  257
    Nietzsche on Nihilism: A Unifying Thread
    Philosophers' Imprint 19. 2019.
    Nihilism is one of Nietzsche’s foremost philosophical concerns. But characterizing it proves elusive. His nihilists include those in despair in the wake of the “death of God.” Yet they also include believing Christians. We have, among these nihilists, those fervently committed to frameworks of cosmic meaning. But we also have those who lack any such commitment, epitomized in the “last man.” We have those who want to escape this life. And we have those who wouldn’t dream of such a prospect. Extan…Read more
  •  16
    Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, edited by JanawayChristopher and RobertsonSimon. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 262.
  •  44
    Book synopsis: The first full and sustained discussion of Parfit's views on objectivity in ethics Leading philosophers respond to Parfit's criticisms and advance our understanding of the arguments An essential companion volume to Parfit's On What Matters, Volume Three In the first two volumes of On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that there are objective moral truths, and other normative truths about what we have reasons to believe, and to want, and to do. He thus challenges a view of the role …Read more
  •  20
    In this paper, I suggest that we need to enrich our discussion of meta-normativity in the philosophy of art by moving beyond the traditional focus on aesthetic value, the putative properties underwriting such value, and the related concepts, discourse, and judgments. When it comes to much of the normativity arising in our engagement with art (in interpretation, performance, staging, display, and appreciation) such matters of aesthetic value are not decisive, and they are often beside the point. …Read more
  •  26
    It has sometimes been held that instrumental music on its own, without text or program, is a kind of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music, having no significant truck with extra-musical reality. While bird calls and canon shots might get countenanced, nothing in the vein of a philosophical worldview, a rich narrative, or a socio-political subtext is going to make the formalist’s strict cut. There has been considerable discussion in the analytic aesthetics of music about these issues and about closely-rela…Read more
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    Book Review of Scruton's Aesthetics (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (1): 104-107. 2014.
    Few philosophers have published at the impressively prolific rate that Roger Scruton has. Of the forty-two books by Scruton listed in a special bibliography at the end of Scruton’s Aesthetics, no fewer than nine of them have been devoted to topics in aesthetics. The present volume, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, arises out of a 2008 conference devoted to Scruton’s seminal work in this field. While sympathetic in tone, the majority of the essays critically engage with Scruton’s views …Read more
  •  184
    Naughty beliefs
    Philosophical Studies 160 (2): 209-222. 2012.
    Can a person ever occurrently believe p and yet have the simultaneous, occurrent belief q that this very belief that p is false? Surely not, most would say: that description of a person’s epistemic economy seems to misunderstand the very concept of belief. In this paper I question this orthodox assumption. There are, I suggest, cases where we have a first-order mental state m that involves taking the world to be a certain way, yet although we ourselves acknowledge that we are in m, we reflective…Read more
  •  109
    Hegel on Comedy: Theodicy, Social Criticism, and the 'Supreme Task' of Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (2): 227-240. 2014.
    According to Hegel, art in its ‘supreme task’ is engaged in ‘bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit’. Raymond Geuss, in a highly illuminating paper, has connected Hegel’s conception of art’s supreme task with the project of theodicy. In this paper I explore Hegel’s aesthetics of comedy through this theodicy-based framework Geuss has proposed, and I consider what light this framework can shed on comedy and…Read more
  •  88
    Nietzsche on the health of the soul
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (1-2): 135-164. 2017.
    Health is a central concept in Nietzsche’s work. Yet in the most philosophically sophisticated secondary literature on Nietzsche, there has been fairly little sustained treatment of just what Nietzschean health consists in. In this paper, I aim to provide an account of some of the central marks of this health: resilience, discipline, vitality, a certain positive condition of the will to power, a certain tendency toward integration, and so on. This exposition and discussion will be the main task …Read more
  •  171
    Nietzsche’s meta-axiology: against the skeptical readings
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2): 322-342. 2014.
    In this paper, I treat the question of the meta-axiological standing of Nietzsche's own values, in the service of which he criticizes morality. Does Nietzsche, I ask, regard his perfectionistic valorization of human excellence and cultural flourishing over other ideals to have genuine evaluative standing, in the sense of being correct, or at least adequate to a matter-of-fact? My goal in this paper is modest, but important: it is not to attribute to Nietzsche some sophisticated meta-axiological …Read more