Nietzsche S Dynamic Metapsychology

An analysis and assessment of Nietzsche's metapsychology. Nietzsche is neither a dualist nor a physical reductionist about the mind. Instead, he is best interpreted as thinking that the mind is embodied and embedded in a larger natural and social environment with which it is dynamically engaged.

An analysis and assessment of Nietzsche's metapsychology. Nietzsche is neither a dualist nor a physical reductionist about the mind. Instead, he is best interpreted as thinking that the mind is embodied and embedded in a larger natural and social environment with which it is dynamically engaged.

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive thinkers of the western philosophical canon. Yet until recently, his ethics has been sidelined within Anglophone moral philosophy. Simon Robertson offers the first sustained, single-authored critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance, arguing that Nietzsche raises well-motivated challenges to morality's objectivity, authority, and value. Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics develops insightful arguments about ethical objectivity, the pitfalls of internalising moral values, and the relation between good and bad. Robertson concludes by considering Nietzsche's broader import: how he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.

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.

Nietzsche’s “drive theory”, as it is referred to in the secondary literature, is a rich, unique and fascinating articulation of the human condition. In broad brushstrokes, Nietzsche appears to contend that all human psychology is either directly reducible to animal drives (e.g. sex, aggression) or indirectly explicable to the historical transformations thereof (e.g. ressentiment). Moreover, Nietzsche’s initial elucidation of drive theory in On the Genealogy of Morals (and elsewhere) is well-complemented with a fecund, profound, and clear elucidation of the concept in the secondary literature. Yet, there remains a glaring lacuna for all the discussion of drive theory in the scholarship. The secondary literature is delinquent in explaining how animal drives became incorporated to form the human psyche. Nietzsche’s account to elucidate how drives became “digested” or in his words “inpsychated” is called the Internalization Hypothesis. However, as it appears in GM: II, 16, the hypothesis is grossly inchoate. The result of this undertheorization is manifold; its deleterious effects resonate along many axes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The present book, Internalized Valuation: A Genealogical Analysis of Nietzschean Drive Theory, offers an original and fruitful interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology. First, it clarifies what drives are. Second, it provides a new way of thinking about Nietzsche’s genealogical methods and then applies these insights to The Genealogy itself. What follows is a work that not only sheds much-needed light on Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind in general and his theory of emotions in particular, but also informs and illuminates problematic passages of Nietzsche’s Genealogy.

Nietzsche’s Naturalist Deconstruction of Truth: A World Fragmented in Late Nineteenth-Century Epistemology offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s discussions of truth and knowledge, covering the period from his early essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” to his late notebooks. It places these discussions in the context of the neo-Kantian, Naturalist, Positivist, and Pragmatic schools influential in Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century Europe. Peter Bornedal argues for a view of Nietzsche’s epistemological thought as an elaboration of this paradigm: proposing ideas that are anti-metaphysical and anti-theological in their polemic orientation, and in general promoting new scientific naturalist ideals in the discussions of knowledge. Bornedal suggests that the rational pursuit of these new ideals to the unencumbered mind logically leads to Nihilism in its most profound epistemological sense. Nietzsche’s “critique of metaphysics” is thus seen as having sprung from sources different from and, at times, in patent opposition to more recent postmodern and deconstructionist critiques. This book contextualizes Nietzsche in relation to a number of philosophical peers and juxtaposes him to contemporary thinkers in a way that resolves some of the difficulties that have plagued recent Nietzsche scholarship.

Nietzsche’s thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in both the Anglo- American and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind presents 16 essays from analytic and continental perspectives. Appealing to both international communities of scholars, the volume seeks to deepen the appreciation of Nietzsche’s contribution to our understanding of consciousness and the mind. Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have engaged with Nietzsche’s thought, including anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, to name just a few. His rich and perspicacious treatment of consciousness, mind, and body cannot be reduced to any single discipline, and has the potential to speak to many. And, as several contributors make clear, Nietzsche’s investigations into consciousness and the embodied mind are integral to his wider ethical concerns. This volume contains contributions by international experts such as Christa Davis Acampora (Emory University), Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick University), João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University), Manuel Dries (The Open University; Oxford University), Christian J. Emden (Rice University), Maria Cristina Fornari (University of Salento), Anthony K. Jensen (Providence College), Helmut Heit (Tongji University), Charlie Huenemann (Utah State University), Vanessa Lemm (Flinders University), Lawrence J. Hatab (Old Dominion University), Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen (New York University and EGS), and Benedetta Zavatta (CNRS).

This book examines the nature of Freud's relationship to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche regarded himself, among other things, as a psychologist. His psychological explorations included an understanding of the meaning and function of dreams, the unconscious, sublimation of drives, drives turned inward upon the self, unconscious guilt, unconscious envy, unconscious resistance, and much more that anticipated some of Freud's fundamental psychoanalytic concepts. Although Freud wrote of Nietzsche having anticipated psychoanalytic concepts, he denied that Nietzsche had any influence on his thought.