Bill Cooke on the humanist value of Nietzsche. The story of the long rehabilitation of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) after being unfairly implicated in the rise of Nazism is well known. But the time may be coming when another daring rescue operation will be called for. For several years now, Nietzsche has been hailed as one …
An introduction by H. James Birx. “Let us assume that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year 2000.”Nietzsche, 24 September 1886” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche has emerged as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, although both controversy and confusion surround his life and thought. He was born on 15 …
J. Harvey Lomax on the love of eternity. Dedicated to Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer on his 100th birthday. “Docemur disputare, non vivere.”(“We are taught how to discuss and debate, but not how to live.”)Seneca Epistulae morales 95, 13 In the twentieth century “the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, erupted once again …
Nietzsche rejected all conventional morality but he wasn’t a nihilist – he called for a “re-evaluation of all values”. Alexander V. Razin describes the gulf separating him from that other great moralist, Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Nietzsche presented the world with a philosophy of life that called for a rigorous reevaluation of all values. His critical …
H. James Birx looks at Darwin’s profound influence on Nietzsche’s dynamic philosophy. The scientist Charles Darwin had awakened the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche from his dogmatic slumber by the realization that, throughout organic history, no species is immutable (including our own). Pervasive change replaced eternal fixity. Going beyond Darwin, the German thinker offered an interpretation of …
Peter Benson tells us how critiques of both Marx and capitalist society have evolved in France, with special reference to Jean Baudrillard and Bernard Stiegler. In 1989, when the Soviet Union imploded and its satellite states chaotically collapsed, there were those in the West who declared that communism had been not only defeated but refuted. …
Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and …
Brian King wonders what there is about human minds that’s unique to us. There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that …
Adrian Brockless on the proper way to use the words ‘thought’ and ‘consciousness’. The concept of thought is one with which people make mischief. Is thought to do with what it is like to have experiences? How can we know for sure that others think as we do? In what ways are thought and consciousness …
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it? If we found out next week that neuroscientists had conclusively demonstrated that free will does not exist and that our so-called ‘choices’ are purely the result of automatic brain functions, I think we would be right to take this news badly. …