Nietzsche's radical experimentalism

The literary complexity of Nietzsche's writings is by now largely familiar; it needs no further display. Instead, I try to reconstruct some of his ideas such that they amount to a sustained philosophical argument and promising project, namely, an attempt to understand — after the Kantian and Darwinian turns — the very possibility of the formation and continuation of infinite varieties of forms of life.I demonstrate that such a project could make good sense only as a transcendental experiment in which the idea of a reality which is ready-made, immutable, and fixed in itself must not only be dismissed as something incomprehensible, but as something not in the least worth striving for, and replaced by the idea of synergetic processes (of self-organization) and what Nietzsche called art without an artist. Read as an empirical-historical narrative we would have to reject Nietzsche's account as a mere rhapsody and arrogant fantasy.Abbreviations AS Attempt at a Self-Criticism. 1886 Preface, BT. - BG Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. - BT The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. - GM On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufmann & R. J. Holingdale. New York: Vintage books, 1967. - GS The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. - HH Human, All Too Human. Volume 1. Trans. M. Faber, with S. Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. - HI On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life. Trans. P. Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. - NF Nachgelassene Fragmente.Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Volumes 7–13. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: dtv-W. de Gruyter, 1980. - PT On the Pathos of Truth.Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870s. Trans. and ed. D. Breazeale. Atlantic Heights: Humanities Press, 1979. - TL On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Ibid. - UM Untimely Meditations. - WP The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Holingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.     

Where Are All the Pragmatist Feminists?

Unlike our counterparts in Europe who have rewritten their specific cultural philosophical heritage, American feminists have not yet critically reappropriated our own philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. The neglect is especially puzzling, given that both feminism and pragmatism explicitly acknowledge the material or cultural specificity of supposedly abstract theorizing. In this article I suggest some reasons for the neglect, call for the rediscovery of women pragmatists, reflect on a feminine side of pragmatism, and point out some common features. The aim is to encourage the further development of a feminist revisioning of pragmatism and a pragmatist version of feminism.     

Truth & Use

I show why the standard textbook argument against thepragmatist reconstruction of truth should be dismissedas a fallacy. It only works if one inadvertentlysubstitutes for the pragmatist concept of knowledge anunreconstructed one that predates the experimentalrevolution in philosophy (likened to the Copernicanrevolution in astronomy) started by Kant and completedby Dewey. I argue (as did Dewey against Russell) thatthe concept of propositions as mental reconstructionsof what is the case converts a function in inquiryinto an independent structure, which is anotherfallacy.