My main focus has been on Nietzsche’s ethics. This is the subject of a short book (Nietzsche’s Ethics), in which I set out his late, ethical view as clearly and as accurately as I possibly can. I have also written about his views on mind, history and freedom, as well as his intellectual context. Nietzsche’s thinking does not neatly divide into standard philosophical divisions, though, and I am interested in all aspects of his work. I am the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche.
My work on Nietzsche led me to questions about method: what are scholars — especially philosophers — trying to do when they read Nietzsche (and other figures in the history of philosophy)? Two papers address this directly. One treats the so-called principle of charity (which I don’t much like). The other is best summed up by its title question: ‘Must we choose between Real Nietzsche and Good Philosophy?’ To put it provocatively and a little simplistically, one way in which my work on Nietzsche might stand out, in relation to some of my contemporaries, is that — suitably qualified — I tend towards thinking that the answer to this question is ‘yes’.
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Review: Moral Psychology with Nietzsche, by Brian Leiter
MIND, forthcoming
MIND has a policy of commissioning relatively long reviews of about 4,000 words, in order to allow reviewers to make a substantial contribution to the journal.
I was invited to write a long review of Brian Leiter’s new book.
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Nietzsche's Schopenhauer
The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Edited by Robert L. Wicks. OUP: Forthcoming.
My contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer looks at Schopenhauer’s relation to Nietzsche. My guiding question is: how might Schopenhauer have responded to Nietzsche’s criticisms of him? Starting with a central bone of contention — Mitleid (pity, compassion) — I track their disagreements across different philosophical terrain, from psychology, to history, to the affirmation of life. I also consider their different takes on philosophical style.
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History, Nature, and the 'Genetic Fallacy' in The Antichrist's Revaluation of Values
Conway, Daniel, ed. Nietzsche and the Antichrist: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 21-42
The central question in this paper is the following: how does Nietzsche use history in his critique of morality? The answer, in sum: interestingly, not how you (i.e. most Nietzsche scholars) think, and not well enough.
My focus is on The Antichrist, not his Genealogy of Morality, which is more commonly used to answer this question. And I look, in particular, at Nietzsche’s use of good, contemporary scholarship on the origins of Judaism.
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The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche
Cambridge University Press, 2019
A new, edited collection of essays, forming a comprehensive guide to Nietzsche.
In addition to editing the collection, I contributed two chapters. The first is an introduction to Nietzsche’s life and works. The second is a chapter on his ethics and his notion of the ‘affirmation of life’.
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Must We Choose between Real Nietzsche and Good Philosophy?
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49:2 (2018) pp. 277-283
This is a short, critical manifesto about method in Nietzsche scholarship. I suggest some rules for how to use his texts and their historical context — rules I hope we can agree on. But I raise doubts about whether these rules can be put into practice without changing the kind of ‘Nietzsche’ we produce.
You could put the worry like this: if we were to be shown the actual rules of our current game, we wouldn’t like the rules; if we were to play by rules we like, then we wouldn’t like the game.
Below, you can download the penultimate draft or follow the link to the published version.
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Nietzsche, the Mask, and the Problem of the Actor
from The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting, ed. Tom Stern, (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017)
My chapter in this collection begins with an apparent contradiction in Nietzsche’s writing. On the one hand, Nietzsche liked to describe himself as ‘anti-theatrical’ and he did indeed put forward various criticisms of theatre and acting. On the other hand, he is also known as an advocate of using the mask, a theatrical device, in philosophical communication.
I argue that this tension is resolved by a better understanding of each of its components. But, in resolving this first tension, a further, more troubling tension is revealed: a tension between Nietzsche’s project of translating man back into nature and his views about how such a project could be communicated or expressed. Put simply: it looks like the project of translating man back into nature — of describing us as we really are — is self-undermining.
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“Some Third Thing”: Nietzsche's Words and the Principle of Charity
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47: 2, Summer 2016, pp. 287-302
The ‘principle of charity’ is often used to interpret figures in the history of philosophy. Roughly, it tells us not to interpret someone in a way that makes them look foolish, if there’s a way of interpreting them that doesn’t make them look foolish. After all, they probably meant the non-foolish thing. But in this article, I try to explain why I’m suspicious of the way that the principle of charity is used, especially when it is applied to a philosopher like Nietzsche.
I also wrote a blog post, based on this article, but aimed at a general reader, for the Forum for European Philosophy.
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Against Nietzsche's 'Theory' of the Drives
Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2015), Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 121-140
Nietzsche often writes about our ‘drives’ and their relation to our actions. Did he have a relatively clear, stable and consistent theory of mind or an account of human psychology in which our ‘drives’ play an important part? Can we base our account of his positive ethics on such an account? This latest paper argues that Nietzsche’s writings about drives are inconsistent to the point where a ‘rational reconstruction’ of his views is not possible. To undertake such a task is to underestimate the tangle of contradictory positions Nietzsche takes. Yet many have offered such an account in Nietzsche’s name. Perhaps it comes down to a view about what we read Nietzsche for. I touch on this briefly at the end.
Below, you can find a link to the final version of the paper or a PDF of the final draft.
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'On Analysis' (TLS Nietzsche Review Article)
Times Literary Supplement, No. 5814, September 5th, 2014
This piece looks at Nietzsche and Nietzsche scholarship through the lens of some recently published books. Nietzsche has attracted such a wide variety of interpretations; it is fruitful to think about why. One focus of the piece, via the recent publication of the Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (eds Gemes/Richardson), is the so-called ‘analytic Nietzsche’: who is he and what does he want?
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Nietzsche, Amor Fati and The Gay Science
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 113, Issue 2, 2013, pp. 145-162.
This recent paper looks at Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati, to see what it is and whether it might support a Nietzschean ethic of some kind. Most writers think that, in endorsing ‘amor fati’, Nietzsche requires us to love all the terrible things that happen to us. I argue that this is a bad idea in general and a very bad idea if you are Nietzsche. So I offer a different interpretation.