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2873Constitutivism about Practical ReasonsIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 367-394. 2018.This paper introduces constitutivism about practical reason, which is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. According to this view, action has a certain structural feature – a constitutive aim, principle, or standard – that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to derive normative claims. In short, the authority…Read more
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1511I 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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1243An 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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1003Nietzsche'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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824Philosophy 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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810Review 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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805Fanaticism 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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733Nietzschean 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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683Group 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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630Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical PsychologyIn Kristin Gjesdal (ed.), Debates in Nineteenth Century Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, Routledge. pp. 326-338. 2016.Bernard Williams’ “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology”, replete with provocative and insightful claims, has been extremely influential in Nietzsche scholarship. In the two decades since its publication, much of the most interesting and philosophically sophisticated work on Nietzsche has focused on exactly the topics that Williams addresses: Nietzsche’s moral psychology, his account of action, his naturalistic commitments, and the way in which these topics interact with his critique of tradi…Read more
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624Nietzsche 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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555Recent 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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531The Emergence of the Drive Concept and the Collapse of the Animal/Human DivideIn Peter Adamson & G. Fay Edwards (eds.), Animals: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Oxford University Press. 2018.In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers including Kant and Hegel draw a sharp distinction between the human and the animal. The human is self-conscious, the animal is not; the human has moral worth, the animal does not. By the mid to late nineteenth century, these claims are widely rejected. As scientific and philosophical work on the cognitive and motivational capacities of animals increases in sophistication, many philosophers become suspicious of the idea that ther…Read more
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461What 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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461Nietzsche's Philosophical PsychologyIn John Richardson & Ken Gemes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. pp. 727-755. 2013.Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche's accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an ac…Read more
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431Routledge Philosophical Minds: The Nietzschean MindRoutledge. 2018.28 essays on all aspects of Nietzsche's thought. The attached file contains the introduction and table of contents.
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426Fanaticism 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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425On Homuncular Drives and the Structure of the Nietzschean SelfJournal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (1): 1-11. 2014.If Clark and Dudrick have their way, gone will be the days of breezy writings on Nietzsche that recruit a phrase from here, a paragraph from there, and construct an interpretation from the resultant mélange. Clark and Dudrick advocate a meticulous, line-by-line study of Nietzsche’s text, with painstaking attention not only to the broader context of his claims, but even to the precise intent of the images and metaphors that he employs. Here, we find a level of textual scrutiny and careful conside…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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399Autonomy, Character, and Self-UnderstandingIn Iskra Fileva (ed.), Questions of Character, Oxford University Press. 2016.Autonomy, traditionally conceived, is the capacity to direct one’s actions in light of self-given principles or values. Character, traditionally conceived, is the set of unchosen, relatively rigid traits and proclivities that influence, constrain, or determine one’s actions. It’s natural to think that autonomy and character will be in tension with one another. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: while character influences and constrains choice, this poses no problem for autonomy. Howe…Read more
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370The 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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339Review 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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320Nietzsche'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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295ConstitutivismIn 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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281The Relevance of History for Moral Philosophy: A Study of Nietzsche's GenealogyIn Simon May (ed.), Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morality': A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2011.The Genealogy takes a historical form. But does the history play an essential role in Nietzsche's critique of modern morality? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. The Genealogy employs history in order to show that acceptance of modern morality was causally responsible for producing a dramatic change in our affects, drives, and perceptions. This change led agents to perceive actual increases in power as reductions in power, and actual decreases in power as increases in power. Moreover…Read more
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265Fugitive Pleasure and the Meaningful Life: Nietzsche on Nihilism and Higher ValuesJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3): 396--416. 2015.Nietzsche’s discussions of nihilism are meant to bring into view an intriguing pathology of modern culture: that it is unable to sustain "higher values". This paper attempts to make sense of the nature and import of higher values. Higher values are a subset of final values. They are distinguished by their demandingness, susceptibility toward creating tragic conflicts, recruitment of a characteristic set of powerful emotions, perceived import, exclusionary nature, and their tendency to instant…Read more
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251Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective AgencyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185-216. 2012.Kant and Nietzsche are typically thought to have diametrically opposed accounts of willing: put simply, whereas Kant gives signal importance to reflective episodes of choice, Nietzsche seems to deny that reflective choices have any significant role in the etiology of human action. In this essay, I argue that the dispute between Kant and Nietzsche actually takes a far more interesting form. Nietzsche is not merely rejecting the Kantian picture of agency. Rather, Nietzsche is offering a subtle cri…Read more
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239Nietzsche on Agency and Self-IgnoranceJournal of Nietzsche Studies 43 (1): 5-17. 2012.Nietzsche frequently claims that agents are in some sense ignorant of their own actions. In this conference paper, I ask two questions: what exactly does Nietzsche mean by this claim, and how would the truth of this claim affect philosophical models of agency? I argue that Nietzsche's claim about self-ignorance is intended to draw attention to the fact that there are influences upon reflective episodes of choice that have three features. First, these influences are pervasive, occurring in ever…Read more
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2354. Kant and Nietzsche on Self-KnowledgeIn João Constâncio (ed.), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, De Gruyter. pp. 110-130. 2015.Kant recognizes two distinct forms of self-knowledge: introspection, which gives us knowledge of our sensations, and apperception, which is knowledge of our own activities. Both modes of self-knowledge can go astray, and are particularly prone to being distorted be selfish motives; thus, neither is guaranteed to provide us with comprehensive self-knowledge. Nietzsche departs from Kant in arguing that these two modes of self-knowledge (1) are not distinct and (2) are far more limited than Kant a…Read more
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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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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 |