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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And part of the importance, I think, of describing Nietzsche as being this kind of methodological naturalist is it explains something about his why he's not a physicalist.
That is, he, like any good methodological naturalist, is perfectly willing to countenance any kinds of entities that figure in successful a posteriori explanations of phenomena.
So very importantly for Nietzsche, right, he proclaims himself the first psychological.
Psychologist, right?
And he thinks psychological explanations are good explanations, better than explanations of the same phenomena in moral or religious terms.
But he's there's no pretense that he thinks the psychological phenomena that figure in good explanations of, say, people's moral beliefs are going to be reducible to physical or natural phenomena.
And now one further wrinkle on the methodological natural phenomenon.
I refer to Nietzsche as what I call a speculative methodological naturalist.
This makes him very much like Hume.
You can be a methodological naturalist in the sense of drawing on a well-established paradigm in the empirical sciences to understand some phenomenon.
The problem for both Hume and Nietzsche is there is no paradigm for them to draw on, right?
Nietzsche has one that he's sort of taken by, which is developments in 19th century physiology.
But Nietzsche, like Hume, also wants to come up with what is essentially a speculative psychological theory that's predicated on certain claims about what human beings are like, and then exploits these claims to explain aspects of human beliefs and practices.
Very much like Hume, I think you see a structure of argument in in Nietzsche that we that is familiar from Hume, which is
We take some class of beliefs, say beliefs in causation for Hume, or in the case of Nietzsche, beliefs in morality, and he is skeptical, Nietzsche and Hume both are skeptical that these beliefs can be rationally vindicated, right?
That we would be warranted in holding them based on our best rational criteria for what would warrant holding those beliefs.
And then the puzzle arises: well, why do we hold these beliefs?
What actually explains it?
And this is where the spectrum
Speculative naturalism kicks in as a way of providing usually a certain kind of psychological explanation for why creatures like us would nonetheless accept these beliefs even though there's no rational vindication for them.
Showing 341–360 of 530 · page 18 of 27
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