February 2012
1 post
Nietzsche's Psychology Course
UC Berkeley has a program called “decal” in which students, under the guidance of an advisor, are able to offer a one to two unit course that other students can enroll and take. I’ve previously offered a course on Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (you can view the page for it here) with R. Jay Wallace as the advisor. This semester, the course will be titled,...
January 2012
1 post
Surrealist Photography
Photos by Philip Cerda
December 2011
1 post
Reflection and Impartiality
Click here to read the formatted pdf with footnotes: http://bit.ly/s4Cv8f.
1 — The Moral Point of View
Taking reflection as the moral point of view, I want to argue that reflection does not have the impartiality that certain moral philosophers take it to have. To begin, I want to look at the work of Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere and Christine Korsgaard in her book The Sources of...
July 2011
1 post
Virtual Reading Group on Nietzsche
I’ve created a new website devoted to the discussion of Nietzsche’s texts.
The website will be conducted as a virtual reading group, where we’ll work through each of Nietzsche’s books at a rate of approximately one aphorism per day (or four shorter maxims a day). I’ve chosen to begin with the text of Twilight of the Idols, and I warmly invite other interested readers...
May 2011
1 post
2 tags
Nietzsche on Agency and the Will
Here is the problem: there are several passages in Nietzsche that make it seem as though agency is an illusion and has no causal force whatsoever. However, many philosophers of action would be at threat if this were true, since you need an agent in order to have genuine actions (as opposed to mere happenings). Although the passages that I will discuss from Nietzsche bring our conception of...
April 2011
1 post
7 tags
Audio & Visual Media
Audio:
Nietzsche on Morality (Christopher Janaway) Philosophy Bites published this podcast in which Janaway discusses the role of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morality.
Nietzsche’s Myths (Brian Leiter) Philosophy Bites published this podcast in which Leiter dispels myths about Nietzsche. This is an excellent podcast for someone getting introduced to Nietzsche’s ideas.
Nietzsche...
February 2011
1 post
2 tags
Nietzsche's Theory of the Will
Among Brian Leiter’s essays, the one that has generated the greatest amount of productive discourse is probably “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will” (in addition, his essay “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Action” is basically a shorter version of this essay). “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will” is an important essay in the study of Nietzsche’s...
August 2010
1 post
3 tags
Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation
I’d like to discuss the excellent essay by Ken Gemes titled, “Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation”. This essay attempts to describe what “sublimation” means to Nietzsche and how he offers a criteria for the term that is purely psychological, self-contained, and free from cultural norms. The essay essentially uses Nietzsche to clarify a term in Freud, to define “sublimation” on a...
July 2010
2 posts
3 tags
The Role of Consciousness in Schopenhauer
At the conclusion of a Schopenhauer & Nietzsche seminar that I completed in the previous spring semester, I wrote a paper titled, ”On the Role of Consciousness in Schopenhauer”.
The essay presents a look into how Schopenhauer conceives of consciousness and its battle with the unconscious. I then conclude the essay with several objections to Schopenhauer brought up by Nietzsche. ...
1 tag
