Continental Philosophy

Review of Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks

This is the tenth volume by Nietzsche in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, giving him the most books in the series (followed by Kant with seven volumes). Like all the other Nietzsche volumes, Writings from the Early Notebooks contains an Introduction followed by suggestions for further reading, together with bibliographical notes on the texts and notes on the translation. The texts are presented in a new translation. Added to them is an impressive number of very informative footnotes that provide the biographical, historical and intellectual background without which a lot of the material would be barely comprehensible. All these features make this volume, like many others in the series, very helpful for both students and researchers.

via Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss (ed.), Alexander Nehamas (ed.) – Writings from the Early Notebooks – Reviewed by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt Universität – Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame.

Diacritics 38.1-2 Derrida and Democracy
Eds. Jonathan Culler and Phillip E. Lewis

Derrida and Democracy
Jonathan Culler

Part One
“The Most Interesting Thing in the World”
Jonathan Culler

Passionate Secrets and Democratic Dissidence
David Wills

Signed Paine, or Panic in Literature
Peggy Kamuf

Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Literature with Deconstruction
Henry Sussman

Spectral Gatherings: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word
Michael G. Levine

Part Two
For Better and for Worse (There Again . . .)
Geoffrey Bennington

Rogue Democracy
Samuel Weber

A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune
Samir Haddad

Nondialectical Materialism
Pheng Cheah

Untread and Untried: Nietzsche Reads Derridemocracy
Avital Ronell

Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables
Richard Klein

Part Three
Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?
Ernesto Laclau

Time, Desire, Politics: A Reply to Ernesto Laclau
Martin Hägglund

TOC

After Montinari: On Nietzsche Philology, Werner Stegmaier and Lisa Marie Anderson

Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy (1870–1886), H. W. Siemens

Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation, Ken Gemes

Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy, Michael Ure

About Nietzsche Source: Nietzsche Source is a web site devoted to the publication of scholarly content on the work and life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The contents of the site and its internet addresses are stable and can be freely consulted
and used for scholarly purposes. Two editions are currently being published in Nietzsche Source: the digital version of the standard critical edition
[http://www.nietzschesource.org/documentation/en/eKGWB.html] and the facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate [http://www.nietzschesource.org/documentation/en/DFGA.html].

The British Society for Phenomenology Conference 2009

St Hildas’ College, Oxford April 3 – 5

The full programme and registration forms are available from the BSP web-site: http://www.britishphenomenology.com.

If you have any queries, please contact David Webb: d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Ullrich Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University)

‘History: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s 2nd Untimely Meditation’

David Krell (Depaul University)

‘Nietzsche in Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié’

Will McNeill (Depaul University)

‘The Descent of Philosophy: On the Nietzschean Legacy in Heidegger’s Phenomenology’

Graham Parkes (University College Cork)

‘Nietzsche on Experiencing the Natural World – As It Really Is?’

Andrea Rehberg (Bilkent University)

‘Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: Physiology, Body, Flesh’

John Sallis (Boston College)

‘Perspectives on Shining: Nietzsche and Beyond’

Jim Urpeth (Greenwich University)

‘The Phenomenology of Religious Life; Nietzsche and Bergson’

Book Discussion Session

Prof Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University) & Joanna Hodge will discuss Jill Marsden’s book After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Palgrave)

Jill Marsden (University of Bolton) will respond.

A review by Brian Leiter:

Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature — one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all — Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

Shaw’s project is animated by interest in the following issue about political authority in the modern era: namely, how can states in practice have legitimate normative or moral authority when religion is no longer available to secure a consensus on the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ normative criteria? The problem is compounded by the fact that states need to be perceived as legitimate, and thus will use their considerable powers to produce a perception of legitimacy. Against the power of the state to produce the appearance of legitimacy, the rational insight of philosophers into the genuine moral foundations of legitimacy is no match. That, I take it, is the structure of the problem that animates Shaw’s reading of Nietzsche. But is Nietzsche really worried about these issues?

Continue reading the review

David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick

The last decade has seen a flurry of publications on Nietzsche’s ethics and specifically on his critique of “morality” put forward in On the Genealogy of Morality. In addition to a host of journal articles and essay collections, there have been book-length studies of the subject by, among others, Aaron Ridley (Nietzsche’s Conscience, 1998), Simon May (Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality”, 1999), Brian Leiter (Nietzsche on Morality, 2002), and Chris Janaway (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 2007). David Owen’s book is the latest addition to this growing literature. It is plausible to think that this surge of interest reflects a growing acknowledgement among philosophers in the English-speaking world that Nietzsche’s ideas on ethics and morality are of continuing relevance for contemporary thought. But while there has been increasing willingness to engage with Nietzsche among philosophers trained in the analytic tradition, there continues to be fierce disagreement on the merits and precise significance of his contribution, and indeed on its content. Much effort has been expended in recent years on clarifying or reconstructing Nietzsche’s challenge, and on excavating the argumentative structures beneath his polemics, while also making sense of the rhetorical idiosyncrasies of his distinctive philosophical style. As a result, we now have a much clearer and more detailed picture of the various interpretive options and are in a correspondingly better position than a few decades ago to assess the merits of the philosophical positions to which Nietzsche may plausibly be thought to be committed.

Owen’s valuable book offers a sustained, clear, crisply argued reconstruction of Nietzsche’s central arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality as well as some thoughtful explanatory ideas on Nietzsche’s incendiary style in this text, situating both in the context of the development of his thought on morality following his break with his early ethics of heroic love and self-sacrifice (inspired partly by Schopenhauer and Wagner) in Human, All-Too-Human. In Owen’s account of this development, Nietzsche’s point of departure since Daybreak is the “death of God”, the loss of belief in the Christian God among the cultured classes dramatized as the urbane atheism of the people in the marketplace in §125 of The Gay Science. The people in the marketplace consider the loss of authority of the metaphysical beliefs associated with Christianity to be a process that need have no implications for their practical orientation in life, an orientation that remains structured by a certain conception of morality continuous with “Christian” morality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, morality thus understood is rationally dependent on the truth of those now widely abandoned metaphysical beliefs: “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, §5). Nietzsche’s task, as he conceives of it from The Gay Science onwards, is therefore threefold: he needs to provide a broadly naturalistic explanation of the hold that “morality” continues to have — irrationally, by his lights — even on unbelievers; he needs to come up with an adequate evaluative framework permitting him to determine the “value of morality” as a self-standing practice deprived of its metaphysical trappings; and he needs to tell us something about the criteria for assessing evaluative commitments. The last requirement is particularly challenging for him as he is committed to “perspectivism”, a view which Owen interprets as the epistemological claim that justification is necessarily relative to practical perspectives constituted by specific, contingent interests and purposes — and that the idea of a practical justification valid for all rational beings merely qua rational beings is incoherent.

Rest of the review

Philosspher’s Zone:

Scapegoats and sacrifices – Rene Girard

Download Audio – 15112008

Have you ever found that you didn’t want something until you noticed that somebody else wanted it? Were you picked on at school, or were you one of the pickers on? Welcome to the world of the French thinker Rene Girard, who claims that desire needs to be learned and that, once learned, it leads to the finding of scapegoats. And what do we do with scapegoats? We sacrifice them.

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In French, on Nietzsche’s correspondence.

Special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (2007)

Todd, Cain (2007) Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value.

Schoeman, Marinus (2007) Generosity as a central virtue in Nietzsche’s ethics.

Olivier, Bert (2007) Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence.

Kotzee, Ben (2007) Our Vision and our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief.

Tännsjö, Torbjörn (2007) Social Psychology and the Paradox of Revolution.

Hurst, Andrea (2007) Supposing Truth is a Woman – What Then?

Judith Butler,‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

A new blog on Agamben.

“Philosophical insults” through the history of philosophy: a comic strip

“Plato’s Aesthetics“: new in SEP

Ranciere and Nancy on Vendredi de la philosophie

And finally on the “Viroid Life“

The British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference
3rd – 5th April 2009
St Hilda’s College Oxford

Nietzsche and Phenomenology

Nietzsche has been important for many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, yet the relation between his work and phenomenology remains very much in question. This conference will examine both phenomenological readings of Nietzsche and the influence of Nietzsche on phenomenology.

* If there are connections between Nietzschean thought and phenomenology, what form do they take?

* Can Nietzsche be seen as a phenomenologist, or is phenomenological method fundamentally different from his way of thinking?

* What links can be drawn between Nietzsche’s genealogical method and any of the various forms of phenomenology practised today?

* In what respects are Nietzsche’s hermeneutics those of phenomenology: for example, is a ‘physician’ of culture still a phenomenologist, and if so, how?

* In dealing with the theme of ‘Nietzsche and Phenomenology’ it is impossible to ignore Heidegger’s monumental study of Nietzsche. But is it still the paradigm for phenomenological approaches to Nietzsche?

By assessing Nietzsche’s relation to the various phenomenological projects of the 20th and 21st centuries, the conference aims to reconsider the parameters of phenomenology itself – what it aspired to be in the past, and what its validity is for us today.

Speakers

Ulli Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University)
David Farrell Krell (DePaul University)
Jill Marsden (University of Bolton)
Will McNeill (DePaul University)
Graham Parkes (University College Cork)
Andrea Rehberg (Bilkent University)
John Sallis (Boston College)
Jim Urpeth (University of Greenwich)

Conference organizers; Andrea Rehberg and Tony O’Connor.

Further information, including registration details, will appear on the web-site of The British Society for Phenomenology in due course: see, http://www.britishphenomenology.com.

Unfortunately, there will be no space on the programme this year for papers received in response to a call. However, we underline that postgraduate research students and undergraduates are very welcome. Two bursaries will be available for postgraduate students to offset the cost of attending the conference.

To find out more about the bursaries, or if you have any queries, please contact:

David Webb
Faculty of Arts Media and Design
Staffordshire University
College Road
Stoke-on-Trent
ST4 2XW UK
d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Alan Schrift, Questioning Authority: Nietzsche’s Gift to Derrida

Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward, Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age (via wood’s lot)

Zizek, “The Secret Clauses of the Liberal Utopia”:

TOC

The time of hybridity — Simone Drichel

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity — Rosalyn Diprose

Levinas, Habermas and modernity — Nicholas H. Smith

Antinomies of transcritique and virtue ethics: An Adornian critique — Giuseppe Tassone

A law’s tale: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Gertrud Koch

From avenging to revolutionary force: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Hauke Brunkhorst

A review of Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy

Christopher Janaway proposes to “transmit something of the richness and reward to be found in reading Nietzsche’s texts themselves” (p. 2). In the hands of a scholar less skilled than Janaway, such a proclamation would be a red flag to the philosophical reader that a lot of bad paraphrase and mimicry of Nietzsche’s writing style was in the offing. There is, happily, none of the latter, and very little of the former, in this intelligent and illuminating book, which aims to defend two rather precise theses about reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: first, that Nietzsche’s method of writing is intended to engage the reader emotionally or affectively; and second, that such affective engagement is a necessary precondition for altering the reader’s views about evaluative questions — that “without the rhetorical provocations, without the revelation of what we find gruesome, shaming, embarrassing, comforting, and heart-warming we would neither comprehend nor be able to revalue our current values” (p. 4; cf. pp. 96-98).

Rest of the review

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick is hosting a Nietzsche workshop on Thursday 5 June 2008:

Full programme information/speakers can be found at:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/news/nietzscheworkshops2008/openworkshop/

Please register soon to ensure a place

Many of his essays, especially on Nietzsche, are available on his site.

Link

An interview with a sociologist who blames Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty!

Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality… The first story is the story of the father and the mother.

The rest

Link