Johanna Holbrook

In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry Alasdair MacIntyre issues a direct challenge to anyone who purports to defend a Nietzschean view of moral enquiry. My dissertation answers that challenge. In chapter 1, I establish the terms of the debate: I lay out MacIntyre's account of the Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean genealogical project of moral enquiry and his critique of that project. I argue that Maclntyre's critique of the genealogical project rests on an illegitimate connection between Nietzsche and Foucault. ;MacIntyre holds that unless Foucault's efforts to carry on the genealogical project succeed, the genealogical project as a whole fails. He then argues that Foucault's efforts fail. In chapter 2, I argue that the Nietzschean and Foucauldian approaches to genealogy are substantially different. Yet, insofar as MacIntyre's critique of the project depends on his critique of Foucault, and insofar as Foucauldian and Nietzschean genealogy are different, MacIntyre's critique fails to defeat Nietzsche. ;MacIntyre's charge against Foucault is directed at Foucault's notion of the self: he argues that, lacking a coherent notion of the self, the genealogical project is not sustainable. In chapter 3, I give an account of the Nietzschean view of the self, a view that escapes MacIntyre's critique of Foucault. ;In chapter 4, I offer an alternative to MacIntyre's Foucauldian reading of Nietzsche. My reading focuses on the way in which Nietzsche confronts moral enquiry as a profoundly personal problem. Whereas chapter 2 deals with Nietzsche's use of genealogy as a method of moral enquiry, chapter 4 deals primarily with the approach Nietzsche outlines in Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo. I conclude with the suggestion that, in place of Michel Foucault, MacIntyre might find Georges Bataille a more fittingly Nietzschean opponent

In this paper I attempt to answer the question: What is interdisciplinary communication? I attempt to answer this question, rather than what some might consider the ontologically prior question—what is interdisciplinarity (ID)?—for two reasons: (1) there is no generally agreed-upon definition of ID; and (2) one’s views regarding interdisciplinary communication have a normative relationship with one’s other views of ID, including one’s views of its very essence. I support these claims with reference to the growing literature on ID, which has a marked tendency to favor the idea that interdisciplinary communication entails some kind of ‘integration’. The literature on ID does not yet include very many philosophers, but we have something valuable to offer in addressing the question of interdisciplinary communication. Playing somewhat fast-and-loose with traditional categories of the subdisciplines of philosophy, I group some philosophers—mostly from the philosophy of science, social–political philosophy, and moral theory—and some non-philosophers together to provide three different, but related, answers to the question of interdisciplinary communication. The groups are as follows: (1) Habermas–Klein, (2) Kuhn–MacIntyre, and (3) Bataille–Lyotard. These groups can also be thought of in terms of the types of answers they give to the question of interdisciplinary communication, especially in terms of the following key words (where the numbers correspond to the groups from the previous sentence): (1) consensus, (2) incommensurability, and (3) invention

J Britt Holbrook - Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 676-677 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by J. Britt Holbrook University of North Texas Keith Crome. Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. x + 186. Cloth, $68.00. Caveat lector: this deceptively short work presents an exercise in genre-bending that may leave one's head spinning, particularly if one's acquaintance with the thought of Jean-François Lyotard is not quite up to snuff. One may perhaps take the appearance of such a work—written by a Lyotard scholar for Lyotard scholars—as a sign that Lyotard has finally arrived...