Mark Conard

This unconventional and lighthearted introduction to the ideas of the major Western philosophers examines The Simpsons — TV’s favorite animated family. The authors look beyond the jokes, the crudeness, the attacks on society — and see a clever display of irony, social criticism, and philosophical thought. The writers begin with an examination of the characters. Does Homer actually display Aristotle’s virtues of character? In what way does Bart exemplify American pragmatism? The book also examines the ethics and themes of the show, and concludes with discussions of how the series reflects the work of Aristotle, Marx, Camus, Sartre, and other thinkers.

The debate continues as to whether Nietzsche is a proto-postmodernist, who rejects truth, metaphysics, and objective values, or a thinker still part of the philosophical tradition, offering us a picture of how the world is actually put together. Richardson enters this fray with an ambitious project to lay out the implicit system running through Nietzsche's work. The system consists in an ontology around which his other views are organized. A key problem here is making such claims to knowledge about the world cohere with Nietzsche's perspectivism, the idea that any viewpoint is limited, partial, and necessarily interested.

My thesis is that Nietzsche holds a version of transcendental idealism. This project was motivated by several concerns. First, I noted the widely diverse and contradictory readings attributed to Nietzsche in the literature. I wanted to make sense of these various readings and resolve the conflicts as best I could. Second, I wanted to try to make Nietzsche as internally consistent as possible. For instance, if Nietzsche really abandons metaphysics wholesale, why does he seem to hold certain metaphysical positions? On the other hand, if it's true that Nietzsche holds the view often attributed to him that all claims are interpretive or perspectival, how could Nietzsche make metaphysical claims, and how can we take any of Nietzsche's views seriously if they are mere interpretations or if they are merely perspectival? ;I noted first that Nietzsche's earliest position is a Platonic/Schopenhauerian metaphysical dualism which he subsequently abandons. I argue that when Nietzsche subsequently rejects metaphysics he means precisely such dualism, such that he can consistently hold a non-dualistic metaphysics. Further, I note that when Nietzsche does reject dualism, he begins to develop his doctrine of the flux and his falsification and perspectivism theses. I claim on the one hand that he denies that the flux possesses those features which Kant denies the thing-in-itself possesses, and that Nietzsche's falsification thesis is a type of construction thesis wherein the mind constructs experience and the objects of experience by providing the various features which constitute the objectivity of objects: space, time, causality, permanence, substance, etc. In this way, Nietzsche's world-as-flux functions in the same way that Kant's thing-in-itself functions, and Nietzsche's falsified world of experience is the same as Kant's phenomena. In this way, I argue, Nietzsche holds a version of transcendental idealism.

Nietzsche is undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. With ideas such as the overman, will to power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism, Nietzsche challenges us to reconceive how it is that we know and understand the world, and what it means to be a human being. Further, in his works, he not only grapples with previous great philosophers and their ideas, but he also calls into question and redefines what it means to do philosophy. Nietzsche and the Philosophers for the first time sets out to examine explicitly Nietzsche’s relationship to his most important predecessors. This anthology includes essays by many of the leading Nietzsche scholars, including Keith Ansell-Pearson, Daniel Conway, Tracy B. Strong, Gary Shapiro, Babette Babich, Mark Anderson, and Paul S. Loeb. These excellent writers discuss Nietzsche’s engagement with such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Socrates, Hume, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Rousseau, and the Buddha. Anyone interested in Nietzsche or the history of philosophy generally will find much of great interest in this volume.