Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That we ought to see him as having a lot more in common with, on the one hand, Freud, who of course saw Nietzsche as an important predecessor, but then to go within the the sort of mainstream of modern philosophy, see him as having a lot of affinities with a philosophical naturalist like Hume.
Now, we have to proceed carefully with the term naturalism, because it's one of those terms that gets used in a lot of different ways.
Some people want to be naturalists because they think it's the righteous way to be, and other people use the term naturalism as kind of an epithet and a term term of abuse and so on.
So when I say Nietzsche is a naturalist, a philosophical natural, I mean something quite specific.
We can distinguish in the first instance between kinds of naturalism that are essentially substantive, that take the view that uh that represent a certain kind of metaphysical view about what actually exists.
So substantive naturalists say the only thing that exists are natural things and supernatural things don't exist.
This is of course famously uninformative without some way of demarcating the the terrain of the natural, and there are lots of divisions among substantive naturalists, right?
So physicalism is one kind of substantive naturalism.
It's very important to see that on my reading, Nietzsche is not any kind of physicalist, right?
Even though that's a very popular view in
in a lot of contemporary English speaking um philosophy.
He is a substantive naturalist in the fairly un
Controversial 19th century sense of he's a skeptic about the about the supernatural.
But I think the core of his naturalism is what I call methodological naturalism.
And the idea of methodological naturalism is it's really an idea about how one does philosophy and what one's doing when one does philosophy.
And it's the thought to start with that there aren't any sort of distinctive
Philosophical ways of knowing things or solving problems, right?
There is nothing to be discovered via the a priori.
Philosophy in this respect is just continuous with the empirical sciences.
It is perhaps more reflective, more synthetic than the typical practice of the empirical sciences, but it really isn't different in kind.
Showing 321–340 of 530 · page 17 of 27
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