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
How are we going to shake them?
out of that conviction?
And the answer is there's no one technique that Nietzsche employs.
Nietzsche is a sophisticated student of rhetoric.
And so he employs a lot of different techniques, but a lot of the techniques are informed by sort of his naturalistic picture of how moral psychology works.
And so an important part of that, right, is that people's moral commitments and moral beliefs, right, are strongly driven by emotional, affective and unconventional
Conscious factors, that what you believe about questions of right and wrong, good and bad, is not simply a product of rational discursiveness.
And by the same token, people aren't going to be dissuaded from their moral commitments through mere rational discursiveness.
Which is why Nietzsche doesn't write like most other moral philosophers, because he thinks that it's not going to actually have any effect in transforming people's consciousness about morality.
So, how does he write?
Well, the first thing to observe, of course, is he writes in such a way as to sort of get people in the gut.
This is why he's every college freshman's favorite philosopher, right?
He's not this, you know, ponderous, pontificating, sanctimonious, you know, bellyacre like Kant.
No, he's completely outrageous.
He's offensive, he's rude, right?
He makes jokes, he goes in for a great deal of hypothesis.
Superbole, and none of this I think is accidental.
I think because part of what he's up against, and you see this in the genealogy of morality, right?
He says the slave revolt in morals, we don't even see it anymore because it's been victorious.
That is, he's dealing with a readership for whom it's never even occurred to them to think that the morality that they take for granted is something they ought to be skeptical about.
Showing 401–420 of 530 · page 21 of 27
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