•  84
    Nietzsche and Ubuntu
    South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 85-97. 2007.
    Here I argue that aspects of Nietzsche's thought may be productively compared with the role played by the concept of ubuntu in talk of cultural renaissance in South Africa. I show that Nietzsche respects and writes for humanity conceived of in a vital sense, thereby imagining a sense of authenticity that may prove significant to talk of cultural renaissance in South Africa. I question the view that Nietzsche is an individualist, drawing on debate between Conway (1990) and Gooding-Williams (2001)…Read more
  •  72
    Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (1): 138-140. 2013.
    Jessica Berry provides the first detailed analysis of whether, and in what sense, Nietzsche was a skeptic (5). Exploring the affinity between Nietzsche’s work and Pyrrhonism in six main chapters, Berry differentiates between modern skepticism, understood as epistemological pessimism or nihilism (33), and Pyrrhonian skepticism as a commitment to continuing inquiry, based on the equipollence of arguments, “roughly equal persuasive weight for and against just about any claim,” and epochē, suspensio…Read more
  •  67
    Nietzsche, science, and philosophical nihilism
    South African Journal of Philosophy 24 (4): 241-259. 2005.
    Nietzsche offers us a critique of modern culture as threatened by a nihilistic crisis in values. Philosophy is specifically incorporated into Nietzsche's critique, resulting in the claim that modern philosophy, as well as modern culture, is nihilistic. But why should contemporary philosophers give this view credence? In this paper, I put forward some reasons to take Nietzsche's view seriously, focusing on the relationship between science and philosophy. I suggest that modern philosophy still ten…Read more
  •  58
    Nietzsche's philosophy of religion (review) (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (3). 2008.
    Readers might be forgiven raised eyebrows on first noting the title of Julian Young's book. Young's chief and surprising claim is that, even though Nietzsche "rejects the God of Christianity, he is not anti-religious," and that he is " above all a religious thinker" , whose atheism only applies in the case of the Christian God , and whose early "religious communitarianism" or "Wagnerianism" persist throughout the texts . Young defines Nietzsche's early thought as communitarian by virtue of conce…Read more
  •  42
    Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (1): 11-32. 2019.
    Bernard Reginster has argued that in "Nietzsche's terminology, 'experimentation [Versuch]' is a paradigmatic exercise of curiosity."1 According to Reginster, the kind of curiosity in question, as far as Nietzsche's concept of the free spirit is concerned, is not the state of knowing or of being certain of the truth of some proposition, but is rather a matter of the activity or process of truth seeking and of inquiry.2 My own view is very similar: I have argued that experimentalism is a form of v…Read more
  •  39
    Reconsidering Risk to Women: Oocyte Donation for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
    American Journal of Bioethics 11 (9): 37-39. 2011.
    The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 9, Page 37-39, September 2011
  •  37
    Biophysical models of human behavior: Is there a place for logic
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 2 (3): 70-72. 2011.
    We present a two-pronged criticism of Ramos's argument. Our main contention is that the logic of the author’s argument is flawed. As we demonstrate, the author conflates probability with necessity, in addition to conflating free will having causal efficacy with the merely illusory conscious experience of free will; such conflations undermine the claim that individual free will should be both exhibited on a social scale and necessarily cause a particular organized pattern to emerge. In addition, …Read more
  •  34
    A Paradoxical Ethical Framework for Unpredictable Drug Shortages
    with C. D. Brewer, Bayly Bucknell, Heather DeGrote, Loren Fabry, Madeleine E. M. Hammerlund, and Bryan M. Weisbrod
    American Journal of Bioethics 12 (1). 2012.
    The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 16-18, January 2012
  •  33
    The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (1): 9-29. 2016.
    My particular focus in this article is on getting clearer about what Nietzsche’s experimentalism entails. Some immediate resistance may form in response to this proposal, based on my use of the term experimentalism. As Walter Kaufmann has pointed out in a discussion of experimentalism, Nietzsche himself does not discuss his work using this concept; in the original German, Nietzsche uses the terms “Experiment” and “Versuch.”1 In light of this, two main concerns may be raised about my proposal tha…Read more
  •  28
    The Relevance of Existentialism
    The Philosophers' Magazine 84 77-81. 2019.
  •  28
    ABSTRACT This article, invited for presentation to the North American Nietzsche Society at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, is a commentary on Mark Alfano's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. It critically discusses Alfano's synoptic digital humanities approach and examines the efficacy of two aspects of his argument about Nietzsche's philosophy developed using this methodology: the connection between life and will to power, and the role of …Read more
  •  25
    Unrequited
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24 (3): 355-360. 2015.
  •  21
    Daybreak
    In Paul C. Bishop (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Boydell & Brewer [camden House]. 2012.
    I provide a critical interpretation of Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile that identifies the key philosophical work done by Nietzsche in this text, as well as presenting the text as a type of medical narrative. I show how Nietzsche engages with three main questions, drawing thematic connections between themes of physical and psychological health and of ethics, in order to develop a foundation for his critical transvaluation project: First, what is the nature of, and relations…Read more
  •  18
    Nietzsche's Free Spirit Philosophy (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield International. 2015.
    A major collection of essays by a panel of leading Nietzsche scholars exploring Nietzsche's philosophy of the free spirit
  •  18
    (2014). Getting Even More Specific About Physicians’ Obligations: Justice, Responsibility, and Professionalism. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 14, No. 9, pp. 46-47
  •  17
    This unique book explores Nietzsche’s philosophy at the time of Dawn’s writing and discusses the modern relevance of themes such as fear, superstition, terror, and moral and religious fanaticism. The authors highlight Dawn’s links with key areas of philosophical inquiry, such as “the art of living well,” skepticism, and naturalism. The book begins by introducing Dawn and discussing how to read Nietzsche, his literary and philosophical influences, his relation to German philosophy, and his effort…Read more
  •  15
    Distributed Survival
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (3): 183-184. 2017.
  •  15
    ‘Moraline-Free’ Virtue: The Case of Free Death
    Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (3): 437-451. 2015.
  •  12
    Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
    In Carol Diethe, Keith Ansell‐Pearson & Rebecca Bamford (eds.), Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, Wiley. 2020.
    This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's analyses of religion and Christianity, as well as a religious figure such as Saint Paul, so as to highlight the character of his critical procedures and the probing manner in which he subjects so‐called “spiritual” phenomena and matters to psychological scrutiny. Nietzsche attempts to develop a purely psychological explanation of the religious states, including the need for salvation, one that will be free of mythology. One prejudice Nietzsche attacks in Dawn …Read more
  •  11
    Letter from the Assistant Editor
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35 (1): 86-87. 2008.
  •  6
    This chapter considers how care of the self is a fundamental part of the task of experimenting with what the ethical, when freed from the constraints of moral fanaticism, might mean. Nietzsche provides a sustained critique of moral fanaticism that carries important implications for contemporary analysis of security. Through his psychological probing of the “fantastical instincts” and of the need for the feeling of power Nietzsche is led to cultivate skepticism about politics in Dawn and to favor…Read more
  •  4
    A objetividade em Nietzsche
    Cadernos Nietzsche 43 (2): 91-116. 2022.
    In this paper, I aim to clarify the development of Nietzsche’s account of objectivity in his published and authorized works. In the available scholarship, it has been noted that Nietzsche explicitly differentiates between two types of objectivity. What I shall here call type 1 objectivity is the type that Nietzsche often criticizes, namely objectivity as pure disinterested. Type 2 objectivity is the type that Nietzsche refers to in On the Genealogy of Morality as “future ‘objectivity’”. Having c…Read more
  •  3
    The Virtue of Shame: Defending Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid
    In Gudrun von Tevenar (ed.), Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang Verlag. 2007.
    I argue that moral intuitions about Nietzsche as an exemplar of practical cruelty can be overturned. My argument is based upon the possibility of abandoning the notion of pure and unmediated passivity as intrinsic to the phenomena of human suffering and of Mitleid, as identified by Nietzsche. I claim that wrongly identifying intrinsic passivity in the phenomenology of Mitleid and of suffering generates the moral sceptical intuition. Once this case of mistaken identity is uncovered, 1 suggest, th…Read more
  •  3
    Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
    In Carol Diethe, Keith Ansell‐Pearson & Rebecca Bamford (eds.), Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, Wiley. 2020.
    This chapter examines Nietzsche's remarks on Epicurus in the earlier middle writings, to provide an interpretative framework through which to clarify Nietzsche's thinking on death in Dawn. It considers some points of continuity between Nietzsche's account of death in Dawn and in his later texts. Nietzsche champions Epicurus as a figure who has sought to show mankind how it can conquer its fears of death. The chapter contends that Nietzsche uses Epicurean thinking as a strategy to do his work in …Read more