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Nietzsche’s Metaphysical SketchesIn Ken Gemes & John Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. 2013.This article examines Nietzsche’s metaphysical reflections. Many of these reflections draw upon his rejection of regularity accounts of causation. Nietzsche thinks we cannot adequately understand causation without reference to causal powers, and he accepts a dynamist physics according to which the physical world is exhaustively constituted by powers, so that his ultimate ontology consists of a world of force-like rather than thing-like entities. This metaphysics underwrites his claim of the prim…Read more
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3Truth, Survival, and PowerIn Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.In contrast with views that attribute the biological utility of beliefs to their truth, Nietzsche maintains that their relative utility renders them proportionately more likely to be idiosyncratic expressions of species‐relative concerns. Nietzsche's sceptical ‘argument from utility’—the inference from the practical utility of beliefs to the improbability of their being metaphysically true—is examined and rejected. It is argued that Nietzsche is an early proponent of naturalized epistemology. Hi…Read more
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Beyond Scepticism: ‘For—There Is No “Truth” ’In Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.As well as drawing sceptical conclusions, Nietzsche rejects the concept of absolute or metaphysical truth as unintelligible. Nietzsche's views are elucidated by contrasting his arguments with alternative accounts of ‘objective reality’ belonging to the philosophical canon. It ensues that Nietzsche espouses a variety of anti‐metaphysics premised on the mutual determination of reality and interest. He believes that objective reality cannot be conceived without volitional and intentional agency on …Read more
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1The Will to Power: Nietzsche and MetaphysicsIn Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.Examines Nietzsche's anti‐essentialism in the context of the metaphysics of the will to power, which posits an ontology of interactive and causally efficacious quanta of force characterized exclusively by relational properties. It is argued that this ontological model is marred by a fundamental incoherence. The concluding remarks touch upon the problem of relativism of truth and self‐reference. An attempt is made to situate the metaphysics of the will in the context of Nietzsche's whole philosop…Read more
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IntroductionIn Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.Outlines the standard reception of Nietzsche's work, highlights shortcomings in a representative selection of critical responses, and locates the present study in the context of prevalent scholarship, concomitantly stating its own aims and content.
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The Nature of ‘Inner Experience’In Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.Argues that Nietzsche's pronouncements on psychology advert to basic facts about the constitution of inner experience and are thus incompatible with his anti‐essentialism. Nietzsche's analysis of non‐egoistic behaviour, his proto‐Freudian presentation of mental life as driven by processes inaccessible to self‐consciousness, and his analysis of the ascetic ideal, ressentiment, and self‐deception amount to a picture of human agency in which all significant aspects of inner experience are ‘in reali…Read more
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ScepticismIn Nietzsche and metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 1995.Presents Nietzsche's critical reflections directed at traditional metaphysical categories such as the external world, substance, causation, and self. Targeted theories include the doctrine of substance qua substratum for properties; the Lockean ontology of powers inherent in external objects; the construal of the self as either mental substance or transcendental subjects; atomism; and the belief in the explanatory powers of Newtonian force. It is argued that there is a pervasive general line of …Read more
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Schopenhauer and the beauty of the pastIn David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind, Routledge. 2023.
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Consciousness in the world : husserlian phenomenology and externalismIn Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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6Phenomenology and Science in NietzscheIn Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, Blackwell. 2006-01-01.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Idea of Phenomenology Truth and the Primacy of Life Diagnosing the Will To Truth: A Phenomenological Case Study.
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Aestheticist ethicsIn Simon Robertson & Christopher Janaway (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism & Normativity, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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Ressentiment and the possibility of intentional self-deceptionIn Manuel Dries & P. J. E. Kail (eds.), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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22Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, MusilOxford University Press. 2022.Value in Modernity examines a historical paradigm in ethics that has hitherto not been identified as such: existential modernism. Peter Poellner discusses the central claims of this paradigm through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, Poellner offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. He also …Read more
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46Joel Smith: Experiencing Phenomenology: London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 221 + xv pp, US-$150 , US-$44.5 , US-$31.47 , ISBN: 978-0415718936Husserl Studies 34 (2): 191-197. 2018.
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132Phenomenology and the perceptual model of emotionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3): 261-288. 2016.In recent years there has been a revival of a theory of conscious emotions as analogous in important ways to perceptual experiences. In the standard versions of this view emotions are construed as, potentially, perceptual disclosures of values. The model has been widely debated and criticized. In this paper I reconstruct an early, qualified version of the perceptual model to be found in the classical phenomenological approaches of Scheler and Sartre. After outlining this version of the theory, I…Read more
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86Self-Deception, Consciousness and Value: The Nietzschean ContributionJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (10-11): 10-11. 2004.Nietzsche's central criticisms of the evaluative hierarchies he claims to be inscribed in the philosophical tradition and in various everyday practices are based on the idea that the self is opaque to itself. More specifically, he proposes that these hierarchies cannot be adequately explained without reference to a particular form of self-deception he labels ressentiment. What makes this type of self-deception distinctive is that it is alleged to concern the subject's own contemporaneous conscio…Read more
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174Non-conceptual content, experience and the selfJournal of Consciousness Studies 10 (2): 32-57. 2003.Traditionally the intentionality of consciousness has been understood as the idea that many conscious states are about something, that they have objects in a broad sense - including states of affairs - which they represent, and it is on account of being representational that they are said to have contents. It has also been claimed, more controversially, that conscious intentional contents must be available to the subject as reasons for her judgments or actions, and that they are therefore necess…Read more
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16Literature and Moral Understanding By Frank Palmer Oxford University Press, 1992, x + 259pp., £30.00 (review)Philosophy 70 (274): 605-. 1995.
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165Early Sartre on Freedom and EthicsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (2): 221-247. 2012.This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons-responsive and in a distinctive sense self-determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self-presence, not an object in t…Read more
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46Nietzschean freedomIn Ken Gemes & Simon May (eds.), Nietzsche on freedom and autonomy, Oxford University Press. pp. 151--180. 2009.
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306Affect, value, and objectivityIn Brian Leiter & Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and morality, Oxford University Press. pp. 227--61. 2007.
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3Perspectival truthIn John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche, Oxford University Press. pp. 85--117. 2001.
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14NotebookPhilosophy 70 (n/a): 616. 1995.//static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Aarticle%3AS003181910006592X/resource/name/firstPage-S003181910006592Xa.jpg.