Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in History of Philosophy
Dogs, Domestication, And The Ego, Gary Shapiro
Dogs, Domestication, And The Ego, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In Zarathustra's "On the Vision and the Riddle," three animals-a spider, a snake, and a dog-make significant appearances, as do three human or quasihuman figures-Zarathustra himself, the dwarf known as the Spirit of Gravity, and the shepherd who must bite off the head of the snake. Of these animals, it is the dog who receives the most extended attention. Here, in the passage that along with "The Convalescent" (with its eagle and serpent) is usually and rightly taken to be Nietzsche's most articulate and yet highly veiled approach to explaining the teaching of eternal recurrence, the riddling vision involves animals. …
Übersehen: Nietzsche And Tragic Vision, Gary Shapiro
Übersehen: Nietzsche And Tragic Vision, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Toward the end of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sketches the possibility of a rebirth of tragedy and tragic culture. At this point Nietzsche's seductive language reaches a kind of crescendo; all along he has been inviting the reader to share his sense of what ancient tragedy was, and he does this in part by implying that the question of one's tastes and sensitivities here are crucial in determining whether one is hopelessly caught in the anemic Alexandrian world of modernity (sometimes called "the culture of the opera," later to be called nihilism) or whether one is a candidate for …
Nietzsche And The Future Of The University, Gary Shapiro
Nietzsche And The Future Of The University, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Nietzsche's first generation of readers tended to see him as a thinker, philosopher or prophet of the future; he was the teacher of the superman, the transvaluator of all values, the founder of a new philosophy of the will to power. In the many discourses of the early twentieth century that are devoted in various ways to 'Nietzsche and the Future' there are obvious signs of the nineteenth century cult of progress, although interpreted divergently by social Darwinism, socialism or anarchism. Now we are more sophisticated. Those first readers saw Nietzsche as radicalizing and rewriting the modernist metanarrative (substituting the …
Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro
Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise.” If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have …
Nietzschean Aphorism As Art And Act, Gary Shapiro
Nietzschean Aphorism As Art And Act, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Nietzsche is commonly said to be an aphoristic writer, perhaps the master of the aphorism. Yet it is not clear what is entailed by this stylistic designation or how far it takes us in understanding Nietzsche's thought and writing. It is a mistake to see Nietzsche's writings as exclusively aphoristic, if this is meant to imply that his writings lack philosophical and literary structure. Certainly sections of those books (conveniently numbered and titled) can be regarded as independent aphorisms (if aphorisms are ever independent, a question which must be assessed). In fact the long third essay of The Genealogy of …
Nietzsche Contra Renan, Gary Shapiro
Nietzsche Contra Renan, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
I mean by the title of this essay to allude to Nietzsche Contra Wagner and thereby to suggest the use which Nietzsche made of Renan in formulating some of his most distinctive thoughts. More specifically I suggest that Nietzsche's later view of history, especially as expressed in The Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist, is a critique and parody of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity. (I speak deliberately of Nietzsche's "view of history" rather than his "philosophy of history" because the latter phrase contains too many associations which Nietzsche's view rejects.) What is at issue is not a …
Nietzsche's Graffito: A Reading Of The Antichrist, Gary Shapiro
Nietzsche's Graffito: A Reading Of The Antichrist, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Even those writers who have good things to say about Nietzsche usually do not have good things to say abut his penultimate book, The Antichrist. Like Ecce Homo it is often described as at least prefiguring Nietzsche's madness if not (as is sometimes the case) said to be part of that desperate glide itself. Those inclined to reject the book may be encouraged in this view by Nietzsche's statement to Brandes, in November 1888, that The Antichrist is the whole of The Transvaluation of All Values (originally announced as a series of four books) and that Ecce Homo is its …