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
So to start with, he's got to use certain kinds of, you know, emotional.
And rhetorical provocations to loosen people's attachment, to, as it were, open up a space for critical reflection on this morality.
Now he does employ lots of different kinds of arguments.
So he intends to deploy the sort of the naturalistic picture of persons as a way of debunking assumptions about agency that the typical moral agent might in fact accept, right?
So he takes it for granted quite plausibly that his
Typical, you know, 19th-century German Protestant reader probably does think he has a certain kind of freedom of the will and is morally responsible for what he does.
But at the same time, this reader, insofar as they're part of a culture in which broader naturalistic themes are developing, right, can be made to see that there's a certain kind of tension here, that he's committed to assumptions about agency that don't square with the kinds of things we know about persons that we're discovering about.
About the role of unconscious motivations and behavior, about the role of physiology in behavior and attitudes, and so on and so forth.
So he is at the same time trying to give certain kinds of arguments, but they're almost always embedded in a kind of rhetoric that's very unusual in philosophy.
But there's a reason for that because he thinks that's the only way to actually affect a transformation in somebody's moral consciousness.
You can't argue them out.
out of it through conventional argumentative devices.
So that, as it were, I mean, in a way, it just scratches the surface.
There's a lot of different devices that he wants to use.
If he can convince certain people that if you're an altruist, you can't actually be Beethoven, you know, that's going to get people agitated, right?
Because Beethoven, Goethe, these are cultural heroes.
Napoleon too was a certain kind of cultural hero, a more complicated one in in 19
Century Europe.
And if you convince people that there's a fundamental incompatibility between taking seriously a morality of compassion, of altruism and egalitarianism, and these sort of paragons of cultural excellence, that too is going to make people reflect critically, at least some readers reflect critically on the morality they accept.
Though bear in mind this funny thing about Nietzsche, which is Nietzsche is unusual, he may be unique.
Showing 421–440 of 530 · page 22 of 27
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