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117Depth, Articulacy, and the EgoIn Carla Bagnoli & Bradford Cokelet (eds.), Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good. At 55. (Anniversaries Series, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025), . forthcoming.Iris Murdoch claims that “clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.” Our experience of the world can be blurred by egoism, inattentiveness, and other failings. I ask how we distinguish clear vision from distorted vision. Murdoch’s texts appeal to four factors: (A) attention; (B) unselfing; (C) a form of conceptual articulacy; and (D) love. I ask three questions about these standards: - Are these standards directed at the same goal? (For example, are they all geared toward s…Read more
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319Nietzsche's Theory of Mind: Consciousness and ConceptualizationEuropean Journal of Philosophy 13 (1): 1-31. 2005.I show that Nietzsche's puzzling and seemingly inconsistent claims about consciousness constitute a coherent and philosophically fruitful theory. Drawing on some ideas from Schopenhauer and F.A. Lange, Nietzsche argues that conscious mental states are mental states with conceptually articulated content, whereas unconscious mental states are mental states with non-conceptually articulated content. Nietzsche's views on concepts imply that conceptually articulated mental states will be superficial …Read more
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1194An Introduction to the Philosophy of FanaticismIn Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy, Rewriting the History of Philosophy. pp. 1-18. 2023.What is fanaticism and why is it an important philosophical topic? In this introductory chapter, I discuss the way in which fanaticism arose as a central philosophical concern in the early modern period. Philosophical discussions of fanaticism focus on psychological, epistemic, and behavioral dimensions of fanatics. The fanatic displays psychological peculiarities; epistemic defects; and potentially problematic behavioral tendencies. I discuss the ways in which different philosophers have offere…Read more
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338Review of Kaitlyn Creasy, The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 202208. 2022.NDPR review of Kaitlyn Creasy's 'The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche'
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368The Fanatic and the Last ManJournal of Nietzsche Studies 53 (2): 137-162. 2022.Suppose we accept Nietzsche’s claim that critical reflection undermines our evaluative commitments. Then it seems that we are left with a pair of unappealing options: either we engage in critical reflection and find our evaluative commitments becoming etiolated; or we somehow immunize certain evaluative commitments from the effects of critical reflection. Nietzsche considers both of these paths, labeling the person who results from the first path “the last man” and the person who results from th…Read more
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548Recent Work on Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and EthicsNietzsche Studien 50 (1): 361-381. 2021.A review of the following for books, plus some reflections on Nietzsche's moral psychology and ethics: Alfano: Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press 2019). Leiter: Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (Oxford University Press 2019) Ridley: The Deed is Everything: Nietzsche on Will and Action (Oxford University Press 2018) Stern: Nietzsche’s Ethics (Cambridge University Press 2020) These four books are broadly on Nietzsche’s moral psychology and ethics. The books differ widely…Read more
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420Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy (edited book)Rewriting the History of Philosophy. 2023.Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and attempted to define the distinctive qualities of the fanatic, whom Winston Churchill described as "someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Yet despite fanaticism's role in the long history of social discord, human conflict, and political violence, it remains a relatively neglected topic in the history of philosoph…Read more
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677Group fanaticism and narratives of ressentimentIn Leo Townsend, Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, Michael Staudigl & Hans Bernard Schmid (eds.), The Philosophy of Fanaticism: Epistemic, Affective, and Political Dimensions, Routledge. 2022.The current political climate is awash with groups that we might be tempted to label irrational, extremist, hyper-partisan; it is full of echo-chambers, radicalization, and epistemic bubbles. Philosophers have profitably analyzed some of these phenomena. In this essay, I draw attention to a crucial but neglected aspect of our time: the way in which certain groups are fanatical. I distinguish fanatical groups from other types of problematic groups, such as extremist and cultish groups. I argue…Read more
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801Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable IdealsOxford University Press. 2023.Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive—but often hidden—role in human life. Devotion typically involves sacralizing certain values, goa…Read more
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454What makes the affirmation of life difficult?In Keith Ansell-Pearson & Paul S. Loeb (eds.), Cambridge Critical Guide to Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', Cambridge University Press. 2022.Nietzsche suggests that even individuals who take themselves to bear an affirmative attitude toward life would be horrified by the thought of eternal recurrence (roughly, the idea that our lives will repeat endlessly in exactly the same fashion). But why? Why is it supposed to be more difficult to affirm recurring lives than to affirm a non-recurring, singular life? I argue that standard interpretations of eternal recurrence are unable to answer this question. I offer a new interpretation of ete…Read more
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201Activity and Passivity in Reflective Agency 1Oxford Studies in Metaethics 6 219. 2011.Many philosophers maintain that there is a distinction between acts that the agent plays an active role in producing, and acts that issue from the agent in a more passive fashion. According to the standard account, we can make sense of this distinction by maintaining that reflective or deliberative acts are paradigmatic cases of an agent’s playing an active role in the production of action. This chapter argues that this standard account is mistaken. Reflective or deliberative actions will seem t…Read more
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14Editorial NoteJournal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (2). 2019.The North American Nietzsche Society held its second biannual conference at Stanford University on October 5–7, 2018. The three-day event featured invited keynotes by Jessica Berry and John Richardson. In addition, the program committee selected seven papers from a pool of over seventy submissions. The conference concluded with a group discussion on Nietzsche's attitude toward empirical science, featuring invited presentations by Maudemarie Clark and Tsarina Doyle.Lanier Anderson deserves specia…Read more
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808Review of Agnes Callard, Aspiration (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2): 464-469. 2021.Review of Agnes Callard's Aspiration. Forthcoming in a symposium on the book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
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44Moral Critique and Philosophical PsychologyJournal of Nietzsche Studies 49 (2): 245-253. 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
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797Fanaticism and Sacred ValuesPhilosophers' Imprint 19 1-20. 2019.What, if anything, is fanaticism? Philosophers including Locke, Hume, Shaftesbury, and Kant offered an account of fanaticism, analyzing it as (1) unwavering commitment to an ideal, together with (2) unwillingness to subject the ideal (or its premises) to rational critique and (3) the presumption of a non-rational sanction for the ideal. In the first part of the paper, I explain this account and argue that it does not succeed: among other things, it entails that a paradigmatically peaceful and …Read more
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621Nietzsche and Murdoch on the Moral Significance of Perceptual ExperienceEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 525-545. 2018.: This paper examines a claim defended by an unlikely pair: Friedrich Nietzsche and Iris Murdoch. The claim is that perceptual experience itself—as distinct from perceptually based judgments and beliefs—can be morally significant. In particular, Nietzsche and Murdoch hold that two agents in the same circumstances attending to the same objects can have experiences with different contents, depending on the concepts that they possess and employ. Moreover, they maintain that this renders perception …Read more
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72Nietzsche’s account of self-conscious agencyPhilosophical Explorations 21 (1): 122-137. 2018.This essay is an overview of Nietzsche’s philosophy of action. I discuss the central features of Nietzsche’s account and the ways in which it departs from standard accounts. Section 1 discusses Nietzsche’s view of the opacity of human action. I focus on the way in which the agent’s experience of the world is shaped by unnoticed and unconscious factors. Section 2 asks what role self-consciousness has in the production of action. Section 3 turns to the way in which Nietzsche understands the action…Read more
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18NANS Editorial NoteJournal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (2): 151-151. 2017.The North American Nietzsche Society held the first of its stand-alone conferences at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House in New York City on October 14–17, 2016. The three-day event featured invited keynotes by Bernard Reginster, Christopher Janaway, and Beatrix Himmelmann. In addition, the program committee selected seven blind-reviewed abstracts from a pool of over sixty submissions. The conference concluded with a group discussion on Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy, featuring invited prese…Read more
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14Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, edited by ChristopherJanaway and SimonRobertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, ix + 262 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-958367-6 hb $75.00 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 21 (S4): 9-14. 2013.
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45Response to Bernard Reginster, Jorah Dannenberg, and Andrew HuddlestonJournal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (3): 457-478. 2016.I want to begin by thanking Bernard Reginster, Jorah Dannenberg, and Andrew Huddleston for their exceptionally rich and insightful critiques of my book. It is rare to find commentators who have engaged so deeply and so thoughtfully. Reginster, Dannenberg, and Huddleston have not focused on subsidiary or inessential themes: their discussions target the book’s central topics and pivotal moves in the argument. I am very grateful to them for taking the time to write such challenging and thoughtful r…Read more
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294ConstitutivismIn Kelly Becker & Iain D. Thomson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015, Cambridge University Press. 2019.A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism.
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716Nietzschean approaches to hermeneuticsIn Michael Förster & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.This essay charts several key points of contact between Nietzsche and the hermeneutical tradition. It begins by arguing that the familiar claim that Nietzsche offers a hermeneutics of suspicion is potentially misleading. Seeking a more accurate representation of Nietzsche’s views, the essay argues that Nietzsche’s interpretive stance has several key features: he rejects immediate givens, endorses holism and perspectivism, and sees conscious experience as structured by concepts and language. Meth…Read more
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1498I argue that the rarely discussed Antichrist can serve as perhaps the best guide to Nietzsche’s mature ethical theory. Commentators often argue or assume that while Nietzsche makes many critical points about traditional morality, he cannot be offering a positive ethical theory of his own. This, I argue, is a mistake. The Antichrist offers a substantive ethical theory. It explicitly articulates Nietzsche’s positive ethical principles, shows why these principles are justified, and uses them to con…Read more
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129Value, Affect, and DriveIn Peter Kail & Manuel Dries (eds.), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature, Oxford University Press. 2016.Nietzsche associates values with affects and drives: he not only claims that values are explained by drives and affects, but sometimes appears to identify values with drives and affects. This is decidedly odd: the agent's reflectively endorsed ends, principles, commitments--what we would think of as the agent's values--seem not only distinct from, but often in conflict with, the agent's drives. Consequently, it is unclear how we should understand Nietzsche's concept of value. This essay attem…Read more
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157Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for EthicsJournal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2): 297-314. 2013.Near the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). This raises a number of questions. What are these “fundamental problems” that psychology helps us to answer? How exactly does psychology bear on philosophy? In this conference paper, I provide a partial answer to these questions by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche’s account of value. I argue that Nietzsche’s ethical theory is based…Read more
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422Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean Version of ConstitutivismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 620-660. 2011.This paper has two goals. First, I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s puzzling claims about will to power. I argue that the will to power thesis is a version of constitutivism. Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of agency; in particular, constitutivism rests on the idea that all actions are motivated by a common, higher-order aim, whose presence generates a standard of assessment for actions. Nietzsche’s version of co…Read more
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991Nietzsche's Account of Self-Conscious AgencyIn Constantine Sandis (ed.), Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Davidson, . 2019.An overview of Nietzsche's philosophy of action.
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219The concept of unified agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and SchillerJournal of the History of Philosophy 49 (1): 87-113. 2011.This paper examines Nietzsche’s concept of unified agency. A widespread consensus has emerged in the secondary literature on three points: (1) Nietzsche’s notion of unity is meant to be an analysis of freedom; (2) unity refers to a relation between the agent’s drives or motivational states; and (3) unity obtains when one drive predominates and imposes order on the other drives. I argue that these claims are philosophically and textually indefensible. In contrast, I argue that (1′) Nietzschean un…Read more
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188Nietzsche on the Nature of the UnconsciousInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (3): 327-352. 2015.This paper argues that Nietzsche develops a novel and compelling account of the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states: he argues that conscious mental states are those with conceptual content, whereas unconscious mental states are those with nonconceptual content. I show that Nietzsche’s puzzling claim that consciousness is ‘superficial’ and ‘falsifying’ can be given a straightforward explanation if we accept this understanding of the conscious/unconscious distinction. I or…Read more
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172Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean ConstitutivismOxford University Press UK. 2013.Paul Katsafanas explores how we can justify normative claims such as 'murder is wrong'. He defends an original account of constitutivism--the view that we do so by showing that agents become committed to them in virtue of acting--and resolves philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims.
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |