•  85
    Nietzsche's Critique of Pure Altruism—Developing an Argument from Human, All Too Human
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (3): 308-326. 2015.
    Nietzsche often appears, especially in his writings from the middle period, to endorse psychological egoism, namely the claim that all actions are motivated by, and are for the sake of, the agent’s own self-interest. I argue that Nietzsche’s position in Human, All Too Human should not be so understood. Rather, he is claiming, more weakly and more plausibly, that no action is entirely unegoistic, entirely free of egoistic motivations. Thus some actions might be motivated both by egoistic and uneg…Read more
  •  79
    Amor Fati as Practice: How to Love Fate
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (2): 174-188. 2016.
    On the basis of an interpretation of key passages in The Gay Science, this paper examines Nietzsche's idea of amor fati—love of fate. Nietzsche's idea of amor fati involves the wish to be able to learn how to see things as beautiful. This gives the impression that amor, love, is supposed to play some role in the beautification of fate. But Nietzsche also explains amor fati in relation to his desire to be a devoted “Yes-sayer.” This pulls the interpretation of amor in a different direction; for n…Read more
  •  66
    Slave Revolt, Deflated Self-deception
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3): 524-544. 2015.
    The problem of self-deception lies at the heart of Nietzsche's account of the slave revolt in morality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. The viability of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality is thus crucially dependent on a successful explanation of the self-deception the slaves of the first essay are caught in. But the phenomenon of self-deception is notoriously puzzling. In this paper, after critically examining existing interpretations of the slaves’ self-deception, I provide, by…Read more
  •  49
    Nietzsche’s failed engagement with Schopenhauer’s pessimism: an analysis
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (2): 129-153. 2022.
    ABSTRACT While a common view in the literature is that Nietzsche cannot successfully argue against Schopenhauer’s pessimism, a detailed explanation of why this is so is lacking. In this paper I provide such a detailed analysis. Specifically, a consideration of three of Nietzsche’s strategies for a revaluation of pain and suffering reveals two problems: the problem of ‘the direction of revaluation’ and the ‘dilemma of the intransigence of hedonism’. According to the first, the success of a revalu…Read more
  •  39
    How Smart (and Just) Is Ressentiment?
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (2): 247-255. 2016.
    Ressentiment—the affectively charged desire for revenge that arises in response to a perceived injury1—is for Nietzsche a concept of central psychological explanatory significance, and thus makes up one of Nietzsche’s most important analytic tools in his attempt to delve into the human psyche and fathom its depth. As Walter Kaufmann says, it “constitutes one of [Nietzsche’s] major contributions to psychology.”2 As such, it has been justly awarded ample attention by scholars in the secondary lite…Read more
  •  39
    Heidegger on Guilt: Reconstructing the Transcendental Argument in Being and Time
    European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4): 911-925. 2020.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  28
    As is well known, one of the central “existential” goals of Nietzsche’s philosophy was to combat the No-saying attitude to life,1 which he took to be an expression of what he variably called physiological exhaustion, decadence, or sickness.2 This No-saying—which he contrasted with his ideal of life affirmation 3—he supposed to lie at the core of various philosophical and religious views such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Schopenhauerian Pessimism. All, in one way or another, shared in his view …Read more
  •  22
    _Ressentiment_—the hateful desire for revenge—plays a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s _On the Genealogy of Morals_. _Ressentiment _explains the formation of bad conscience, guilt, asceticism, and, most importantly, it motivates the "slave revolt" that gives rise to Western morality’s values. _Ressentiment_, however, has not enjoyed a thorough treatment in the secondary literature. This book brings it sharply into focus and provides the first detailed examination of Nietzsche’s psychology of _ressent…Read more
  •  16
    The individualization of conscience: what Daybreak (9, 10, 544) and The Gay Science (117) tell us about the sovereign individual (review)
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (1): 1-19. 2020.
    ABSTRACTThe figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings but is present in sections…Read more
  •  15
    The Arguments of Radical Atheism – Some Critical Reflections
    Derrida Today 12 (2): 130-151. 2019.
    The paper provides a critical review of Martin Hägglund's influential Radical Atheism. The paper focuses on what Hägglund calls ‘radical atheism’: the view that according to Derrida ‘the best is the worst’. First, the paper critically examines Hägglund's reconstruction of Derrida's argument for the structure of the trace or ‘the spacing of time’. This analysis clarifies one of the central premises in Hägglund's argument for radical atheism: the ‘contamination’ claim, according to which anything …Read more
  •  14
    The individualization of conscience: what Daybreak_(9, 10, 544) and _The Gay Science(117) tell us about the sovereign individual (review)
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (1): 1-19. 2020.
    The figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings but is present in sections from Da…Read more
  •  12
    "What can guilt, the painful sting of the bad conscience, tell us about who we are as human beings? Being Guilty seeks to answer this question through an examination of the views of Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Paul Rée, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on guilt, freedom, responsibility, and conscience. The concept of guilt has not received sufficient attention from scholars of the history of German philosophy. Being Guilty addresses this lacuna and shows how the philosophers' arguments can be more de…Read more
  •  10
    The Challenge of Nietzsche: How to Approach His Thought
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 53 (2): 210-215. 2022.
    Jeremy Fortier's book is concerned for the most part not with an analysis of Nietzsche's thought as such, but with Nietzsche's autobiographical and metaphilosophical reflections on his own philosophy and the various stages it underwent. The agenda for the book is presented at the beginning: "the aim... is not merely to acquire biographical information about Nietzsche, but to understand how his reflections on his particular life can contribute to the general understanding of experiences that are …Read more
  •  10
    ABSTRACT:Nietzsche is mostly known for denying moral responsibility on account of lack of libertarian free will, thus betraying an incompatibilist approach to moral responsibility. In this paper, however, I focus on a different, less familiar argument by Nietzsche, one that I interpret as a critique of a compatibilist conception of moral responsibility. The critique shows why punishment and our moral sanctions in general are morally unjustified by the compatibilist's own lights. In addition, I a…Read more
  •  5
    Some Recent Work on Nietzsche’s Ethical Thought
    Nietzsche Studien (1973) 49 (1): 316-328. 2020.
    An important question in Nietzsche studies is whether Nietzsche has an ethics to offer his readers; whether, that is, he has a concept of the good, or the just, or the virtuous that can serve as some sort of an ethical guide. An additional, methodological question is whether, in search of an answer, one should focus on a specific period in his thinking, study the evolution of his thought, or attempt to extract an over-arching view that draws on texts from different stages of his thinking. The th…Read more