Christopher Janaway's Blog

_Kantian Review_ 17 (3):431-457. 2012 This paper gives an account of the argument of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will, drawing also on his other works. Schopenhauer argues that all human actions are causally necessitated, as are all other events in empirical nature, hence there is no freedom in the sense of liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. However, our sense of responsibility or agency (being the ) is nonetheless unshakeable. To account for this Schopenhauer invokes the Kantian distinction between empirical and intelligible characters. The paper highlights divergences between Schopenhauer and Kant over the intelligible character, which for Schopenhauer can be neither rational nor causal. It raises the questions whether the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer's position, and whether it can coherently belong to an individual agent, suggesting that for Schopenhauer a more consistent position would have been to deny freedom of will to the individual(direct link)

Authored item in a collection of original research papers, arising out of the University of Southampton's AHRC-funded research project 'Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy'(direct link)

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In Matthias Koßler & Oliver Hallich (eds.), _ Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung _. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 35-50. 2014 (direct link)

_Journal of Nietzsche Studies_ 45 (2):103-117. 2014 When Alexander Nehamas’s book Nietzsche: Life as Literature appeared in 1985, the landscape of Nietzsche studies seemed much more sparsely populated than it is today, and much harder to reach from anywhere else in philosophy.1 Nehamas’s book stood out as a bold and original attempt to give a new angle on how to interpret Nietzsche so that he emerged as an important philosopher, but in a way that could not ignore how extraordinary it was to read him. In this aim it succeeded admirably. Here is a quote: “Exclusive attention to the ‘mere’ content of Nietzsche’s writing has produced the caricatures of the Übermensch, the master morality, and the eternal recurrence, of which the secondary literature about him is full...(direct link)

2014 In their recent book The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick claim that Nietzsche takes Plato’s theory of the soul to be ‘a hypothesis, which his own psychology is an attempt to refine’. This essay accepts that claim, but argues for a more streamlined account of the relation between Nietzsche and Plato than Clark and Dudrick give. There is no justification for their suggestion that Nietzsche diagnoses an ‘atomistic need’ as responsible for what he objects to in Plato’s model. The claim that ‘reason’ is a motivationally inert set of cognitive capacities is not necessarily a point of disagreement with Plato. Nietzsche’s psychology does not require a generalized ‘will to value’ as a counterpart to the will to truth. Clark and Dudrick fail to recognize the Platonic soul-elements as drives, and that the element which for Plato should govern in the best of souls can be interpreted as closely analogous to Nietzsche’s will to truth(direct link)

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Against the claim that Nietzsche’s early and late views on confronting the truth about human existence differ widely, this article argues that in The Birth of Tragedy tragic art is affirmative of life and not limited to beautifying illusion, while later works still contain the idea that artistic production of beauty is a falsification necessary to make existence bearable for us. Nietzsche did not start with the view that art’s value lies in sheer illusion, nor end with the view that truth should be confronted wholly without illusion, but is ambivalent on this issue throughout(direct link)

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_Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews_. forthcoming An article in a Handbook on Nietzsche. Gives an overview of the main philosophical themes and questions of interpretation in Nietzsche's book The Gay Science(direct link)