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19Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German IdealismIn Luca Corti & Johannes-Georg Schuelein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature: New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 247-262. 2023.The concept Gattungswesen, while evidently central to Marx’s early thought, has received surprisingly little detailed philosophical examination. An obstacle to progress when it comes to understanding the concept is a tendency to miss the import of the dimension of universality that Marx says is crucial to the concept. It has often been assumed that Marx must have in mind membership of the human species, where this is considered as one species among others. But an examination of the concept Gattu…Read more
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11Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic by Karen Ng (Oxford University Press, 2020)Philosophy 96 (4): 683-686. 2021.
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28Hegel on spirited animalsPhilosophy 97 (4): 485-508. 2022.Hegel conceives of human beings as both natural and spirited. On Robert Pippin's influential reading, we are natural by being ‘ontologically’ like other animals, but spirited through a ‘social-historical achievement’. I contest both the coherence of this reading and its fidelity to Hegel's texts. For Hegel the human being is the truth of the animal. This means that spirit's self-production is not, as Pippin claims, an achievement that an animal confers on itself, but the realization of what the …Read more
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41Thought and reality in Marx's early writings on ancient philosophyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 1518-1532. 2022.There is little agreement about Marx's aims, or even his basic claims, in his Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy and Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Marx has been read as an idealist, or as a materialist; as praising Epicurus, or as criticizing him. Some have read Marx as using ancient philosophers as proxies in a contemporary debate, without demonstrating how he does so in detail. I show that Marx's dialectical reading of Epicurus's atomism aims at transcen…Read more
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39Second Nature, Phronēsis, and Ethical OutlooksInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (1): 1-18. 2022.The expression ‘second nature’ can be used in two different ways. The first allows phronēsis to count as the sort of thing a second nature is. The second speaks of second natures...
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7Critical History and GenealogyIn Anthony K. Jensen & Carlotta Santini (eds.), Nietzsche on Memory and History: The Re-Encountered Shadow, De Gruyter. pp. 17-36. 2020.
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33The Act and Object of Judgment: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Routledge. 2019.This book presents 12 original essays on historical and contemporary philosophical discussions of judgment. The central issues explored in this volume can be separated into two groups namely, those concerning the act and object of judgment. What kind of act is judgment? How is it related to a range of other mental acts, states, and dispositions? Where and how does assertive force enter in? Is there a distinct category of negative judgments, or are these simply judgments whose objects are negativ…Read more
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29Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice, by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 272 pp. ISBN 13: 978‐0‐674‐97177‐6. hb. £39.95 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 679-682. 2018.
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49Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of Nihilism by Paolo StellinoJournal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (2): 308-313. 2017.In his late work Nietzsche professed profound admiration for Dostoevsky, calling him “the only psychologist [...] from whom I had something to learn”. He also said, characteristically complicating matters, “I am grateful to him in a remarkable way, however much he goes against my deepest instincts”. There is, however, another well-established way of connecting the two authors, due to the Symbolist writer and critic Dmitri Merezhkovsky, which regards Dostoevsky as preemptively refuting Nietzsche’…Read more
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24Genealogy, Evolution, and MoralityIn Tomas Hribek & Juraj Hvorecky (eds.), Knowledge, Value, Evolution, College Publications. 2011.
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107Nietzsche's Genealogical Histories and His Project of RevaluationHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 31 (3): 249-269. 2014.
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69Nietzsche on History as ScienceIn Helmut Heit, Günter Abel & Marco Brusotti (eds.), Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität, De Gruyter. 2011.
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105Nihilistisches Geschichtsdenken: Nietzsches perspektivische Genealogie by Marcus Andreas Born (review)Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (1): 126-128. 2013.As early as 1941, George Allen Morgan wrote that Nietzsche’s thought is “saturated with the historical point of view.” It is breathtaking how long it has taken scholarly writing on Nietzsche to catch up with Morgan and pay this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought the serious attention it deserves. Marcus Andreas Born’s study is therefore a very welcome development as a serious and engaged examination of Nietzsche’s “historical thought.” As his subtitle indicates, Born’s approach focuses on Nietzsche’s…Read more
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90Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought. By Robin Small. London/New York: Continuum, 2010, pp. 202 (review)Philosophy 86 (1): 134-38. 2011.Nietzsche repeatedly portrays himself as an advocate of what he calls a ‘philosophy of becoming’. While in his early Untimely Meditations he had considered the ‘doctrine of sovereign becoming’ to be ‘true but deadly’, from the middle-period Human, All Too Human up to and including his last writings he urges us to embrace this doctrine wholeheartedly. He consistently links the view of the world as being in a state of constant flux with the teachings of Heraclitus, the one philosopher whom he prai…Read more
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66NietzscheIn Tom P. S. Angier (ed.), Ethics: the key thinkers, Bloomsbury Academic. 2012.Nietzsche never presented a worked-out normative ethical theory and appeared to regard any attempt to do so as woefully misguided. He poured scorn on the main contenders for such a theory in his day, and in ours – Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. Moreover, he repeatedly referred to himself as an 'immoralist' and gave one of his books the title Beyond Good and Evil, thus seeming only to confirm the impression that he was more interested in demolishing, and even abolishing morality altogether th…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
European Philosophy |