Alexander Nehamas

Princeton University | PU · Department of Philosophy

Nietzsche sometimes writes as if we are not in control—at least not in conscious control—of our actions. He seems to suggest that what we actually do is independent of our intentions. It turns out, though, that his understanding of both intention and action differs radically from most contemporary treatments of the issue. In particular, he denies t...

Along with our inordinate emphasis on managing our lives on the basis of impartial principles and rules, we have lost the sense that some of the greatest human achievements are accomplished precisely by going beyond anything that existing rules and principles allow. Along with our fixation on the values of morality and politics, which apply to ever...

In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsche's “drives.” They are not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the subject and try to get the rest to follow thei...

In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsche’s "drives." They are not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the subject and try to get the rest to follow thei...

It has not been easy to accommodate what the philosopher Bernard Williams once called the "insistent continuities" between Nietzsche's concerns and our own while also acknowledging, as Williams certainly did, his challenge to the now-canonical understanding of philosophy in anglophone (and, increasingly, not only anglophone) countries. In line with...

The view presented here is deeply indebted to Walter Kaufmann, who, over the span of thirty years, created a picture of Nietzsche which, unlike those it has replaced, can be found accurately and without embarrassment reflected in Mann's novel. To thank him for his picture, this essay was to make to him a gift of its reflection. It is now dedicated...

Problems with representing friendship in painting and the novel and its more successful displays in drama reflect the fact that friends seldom act as inspiringly as traditional images of the relationship suggest: friends' activities are often trivial, commonplace and boring, sometimes even criminal. Despite all that, the philosophical tradition has...

1. I give both the date of composition (when known) and the date of publication for each poem; if only a date of composition appears, the poem in question was not published by Cavafy. The definitive chronology of Cavafy's work appears in the tables provided by George Savidis in his edition, K. P. Kaváfi: Anékdota piímata, 1882-1923 (Athens, 1968)....

AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionISocrates: Questions of Goodness and Method1Meno's Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher32Socratic Intellectualism273What Did Socrates Teach and to Whom Did He Teach It?594Voices of Silence: On Gregory Vlastos's Socrates835Eristic, Antilogic, Sophistic, Dialectic: Plato's Demarcation of Philosophy from So...

This chapter focuses on the role of kalon in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Plato's conception of kalon consists of many strands, all of them contestable and deeply controversial. One is an effort to transform the social fully into the psychological, and preeminence completely into virtue. Another is the view that beauty is a real feature of t...

We should not allow this connection, however, to mislead us into thinking that Socrates is advocating a betrayal of the boy with whom the philosophic lover begins his ascent. Here I must disagree with A.W. Price, who thinks that at this stage the lover ‘is at least unfaithful to [the boy] and may desert him altogether’—although Price does not belie...

Throughout his life, Nietzsche engaged in an intellectual battle with Socrates, toward whom he did not show the kindness and magnanimity he reserved for his other two great « educators » and enemies, Schopenhauer and Wagner. The question is why. The answer is that Nietzsche may have suspected that the « dogmatism » of Socrates (the view that only o...

Mesurant l'influence de l'ouvrage de A. Danto intitule «Nietzsche philosophe» (1965) sur la reception de Nietzsche dans le domaine de la philosophie analytique, l'A. etudie la question du perspectivisme nietzscheen et de la relation qu'il institue entre la connaissance, la verite et les valeurs. Rejetant l'identite verite-utilite etablie par Danto,...

Philosophy and Literature 20.2 (1996) 487-491 Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology, by Graham Parkes; xiv & 481 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. I cannot resist beginning this essay on Graham Parkes's study of Nietzsche's psychology with the first-person pronoun. Parkes provides an erudite...

Though it is often vague, naive, nostalgic and sometimes cloying, Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditations, which denounces history as long as it is not made to ‘serve life’, must still be taken seriously — for two reasons.1 First, because of its virtues, which we must not allow its vices to obscure and which, if Nietzsche is right in agreeing with...

The question that opens and insistently runs through Beyond Good and Evil is, posed for us by what Nietzsche calls “the will to truth,” the drive, need, tendency and desire to know the world for what it is and not be deceived about it.1 Forced by the will to truth to ask questions endlessly, we even question this will itself. “Indeed,” Nietzsche wr...

A la these du nombre indefini d'interpretations possibles d'un texte litteraire, est opposee celle d'une approche multiple et progressive du sens introduit par l'auteur, plus ou moins sciemment| dans ce retour de l'interpretation au present de l'oeuvre, l'auteur doit etre (re) construit, et l'oeuvre elle-meme toujours mieux comprise sans jamais etr...

Traducción de: Nietzsche, Life as Literature Ensayo sobre el pensamiento de Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), cuyo autor recorre las ideas centrales de la obra del filósofo alemán: la voluntad de poder, la del eterno retorno o la de la naturaleza del yo.

Traducción de: The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault

TRADUCCION DE: NIETZSCHE, LIFE AS LITERATURE INCLUYE INDICE