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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So that's how I would try to handle the dilemma that you fairly pose here.
Let me just say, right, I mean, as as you know, I mean, I don't think analytic philosophy exists.
I not only don't think it exists, I know it doesn't exist, because whenever I press anyone to tell me what it is, they c they can't do it.
And what's left of what's called analytic philosophy really is, it seems to me, just certain kinds of scholarly and stylistic commitments, such as an attempt to be clear, to try to be precise about the concepts that you
You're using to engage with a philosophical author dialectically rather than just as an exercise in hagiography or, you know, hero worship.
And that's all I mean by saying that analytic philosophy, when it did exist and as it developed in the 20th century, did provide some useful conceptual tools for trying to tease apart issues in Nietzsche, issues that, you know, may not always
Be clearly separated on the surface of the text.
But I think the more important question is: what would it mean to bring Nietzsche into, as it were, the conversation of moral philosophy?
Now, he's not going to be brought into a lot of the conversation of existing moral philosophy, but there is an important strand in moral philosophy in the last 30 years, which is very deep.
Deeply naturalistic in roughly the sense I take to be at issue in Nietzsche.
That is, there's a strand in moral philosophy which is interested in questions like: how does moral motivation actually work?
What do we know from empirical psychology about agency and what the capacities of human agents really are?
So it's at the intersection of sort of moral psychology and empirical psychology that I think it turns out there's a very happy
Resonance with Nietzsche.
So in my 2002 book, I was offering largely an exegetical interpretive argument about how to understand Nietzsche and then read his genealogy in light of this overarching architectonic of understanding him as a philosophical naturalist on something like the model of Hume.
But you know, the thing about being a philosophical naturalist, a speculative methodological naturalist, is that
The interest of your claims ultimately turns on whether you've got the facts right.
If you're lousy at speculation, then you know you can pretend to be aping the science is all you want, and it's just not very interesting.
So I've been interested in the question, how good was Nietzsche's speculative moral psychology and his speculative psychology of agency and so on.
And so in in work since then I've been looking at
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