Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation

by Christoph Cox

Naturalism and Interpretation offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions?

Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought.

Genres: Philosophy

286 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 1999

About the author

Christoph Cox is an American philosopher, critic, curator, and educator specializing in sound studies, aesthetics, and contemporary art. He is Dean of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. Cox is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, and co-editor of Audio Culture and Realism Materialism Art. His essays have appeared in Artforum, The Wire, Cabinet, and October. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions focused on experimental sound and conceptual art for institutions including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and The Kitchen.