R Lanier Anderson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634879 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Lanier Anderson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R Lanier |
| FAMILY NAME | Anderson |
| SIGNATURE | ANDERSON R L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5082-4882 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Michael L. Friedman (1947–2025)
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
What is Nietzschean about Nietzsche’s perspectivism? Preliminary reflections
Nietzsche’s perspectivism has received restricted and unrestricted interpretations. The latter take the cognitive effects of ‘perspectives’ to be pervasive and general; the former argue they are restricted to special subject matters, have limited effects, or are not essentially cognitive at all. I argue on textual grounds that Nietzsche was committed to the unrestricted view. Comparison to A.W. Moore’s treatment of perspectival representation in …
Transcendental idealism as formal idealism
Transcendental idealism is the basic worldview shaping Kant's critical philosophy, but its proper interpretation is enormously contested. I identify five constraints on an adequate interpretation, which collectively stand in apparent tension. These serve to highlight internal difficulties of the view itself, and also to reveal serious challenges for both the more standard phenomenalist and deflationary interpretations, and newer “moderate metaphy…
Nietzschean Autonomy and the Meaning of the “Sovereign Individual”
This paper has two goals, one narrower and one wider. The limited goal is to address an interpretive dispute over the Genealogy ’s description of the “sovereign individual,” a character type whose features bear on Nietzsche’s distinctive conceptions of conscience, promising, and what it is to take responsibility for oneself. The wider goal is to characterize Nietzschean autonomy. The basic idea is that the meaning of the sovereign individual emer…
The Psychology of Perspectivism: A Question for Nietzsche Studies Now
This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2 (Autumn 2018), in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The…
What Is ‘The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness’? Philosophy as a Way of Life in Nietzsche and Montaigne
Robert Pippin has recently raised what he calls ‘the Montaigne problem’ for Nietzsche's philosophy: although Nietzsche advocates a ‘cheerful’ mode of philosophizing for which Montaigne is an exemplar, he signally fails to write with the obvious cheerfulness attained by Montaigne. We explore the moral psychological structure of the cheerfulness Nietzsche values, revealing unexpected complexity in his conception of the attitude. For him, the right …
Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and His Realism
There is no doctrine more central to Kant's philosophy, nor one more confusing in its fundamental workings, nor one more contested within the reception, than transcendental idealism. In Manifest Reality,1 Lucy Allais develops an interpretation of the doctrine that manages to be genuinely novel and philosophically level-headed, while still rendering Kant's idealism sufficiently radical to have provoked all the controversy in the first place. The b…
The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant's Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics
Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments underwrites a powerful argument against Leibnizian–Wolffian metaphysics. That traditional metaphysics promised to reveal the rational structure of the world by representing all truth as conceptual, flowing from logically perspicuous "containment" relations among concepts. Such a system would be analytic, sensu Kant. But Kant shows that scientifically indispensable parts of our knowledge …
Love and the Moral Psychology of the Hegelian Nietzsche: Comments on Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy
Pippin treats Nietzsche's moral psychology as the key to his philosophy. Three aspects of the psychology are meant to bear this weight: (1) a critical and deflationary, but irreducibly hermeneutic, conception of the nature of moral psychology itself; (2) a thesis that eros is central to Nietzsche's theory of valuing; and (3) an expressivist theory of action, which replaces the causal role of intention with an interpretive notion of expression in …
What is a Nietzschean Self?1
The nature of the self is contested within Nietzsche scholarship. Many texts suggest skeptical eliminativism or reduction of the self to sub-personal drives. But core Nietzschean doctrines (self-overcoming, perspectivist objectivity) seem to require substantial self-management, and Kantians insist that only a separate, transcendental self could play this role. This chapter resists both naturalistic reductionism and transcendentalism. Through anal…
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most influential, provocative, and challenging work of ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, fourteen leading philosophers offer fresh insights into many of the work's central questions: How did our dominant values originate and what functions do they really serve? What future does the concept of 'evil' have - and can it be revalued? What sorts of virtues and ideals does Nietzsche advocat…
On the nobility of Nietzsche’s priests
This chapter aims to make a limited exegetical point about the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), and then to trace its consequences for Nietzsche's argument about the historical transformation that produced our current altruistic morality. The textual point is this: the priests who figure importantly in Nietzsche's story are intended to be unambiguous instances of the noble character type; they are not to be understood as slaves, …
Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration
This chapter examines individual redemption, showing that the Christian concept can be replaced with the replacement becoming superior to the original. It looks at Friedrich Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" thought experiment, in which the reader is asked to imagine how she would react if informed that she will live her life over again, and indeed continue to do so an infinite number of times. To greet this news with ecstasy would be to indicate …
Nietzsche on Strength and Achieving Individuality
Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption
Containment Analyticity and Kant’s Problem of Synthetic Judgment
It Adds Up After All: Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic in Light of the Traditional Logic 1
Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is “contained in” the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in w…
Sensualism and Unconscious Representations in Nietzsche’s Account of Knowledge
L'A. mesure le role des representations inconscientes dans la doctrine nietzscheenne de la connaissance. Soulevant la question de l'idealisme, du realisme et du sensualisme dans le livre 15 de «Par dela le Bien et le Mal», l'A. montre que la distinction perception-concept, ou sujet-objet, qui fonde la these de la falsification de l'experience, permet de resoudre le paradoxe de l'apparence et de la realite au sein du perspectivisme cognitif de Nie…
Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living
To turn philosophy to the service of life—to become the "poet of one's life"—is the animating thought behind Alexander Nehamas's recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. The book's central aim is to argue that philosophy can be an activity, a way of life, as distinct from a body of scholarly doctrine. While it has become standard to insist that "philosophy is a theoretical discipline" [AL 1], producing claims a…
Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism
Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
Nietzsche's will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science
The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant's Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics
Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments underwrites a powerful argument against Leibnizian–Wolffian metaphysics. That traditional metaphysics promised to reveal the rational structure of the world by representing all truth as conceptual, flowing from logically perspicuous "containment" relations among concepts. Such a system would be analytic, sensu Kant. But Kant shows that scientifically indispensable parts of our knowledge …
It Adds Up After All: Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic in Light of the Traditional Logic 1
Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is “contained in” the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in w…
Love and the Moral Psychology of the Hegelian Nietzsche: Comments on Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy
Pippin treats Nietzsche's moral psychology as the key to his philosophy. Three aspects of the psychology are meant to bear this weight: (1) a critical and deflationary, but irreducibly hermeneutic, conception of the nature of moral psychology itself; (2) a thesis that eros is central to Nietzsche's theory of valuing; and (3) an expressivist theory of action, which replaces the causal role of intention with an interpretive notion of expression in …
Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism
Nietzsche's will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science
Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism
Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living
To turn philosophy to the service of life—to become the "poet of one's life"—is the animating thought behind Alexander Nehamas's recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. The book's central aim is to argue that philosophy can be an activity, a way of life, as distinct from a body of scholarly doctrine. While it has become standard to insist that "philosophy is a theoretical discipline" [AL 1], producing claims a…
Sensualism and Unconscious Representations in Nietzsche’s Account of Knowledge
L'A. mesure le role des representations inconscientes dans la doctrine nietzscheenne de la connaissance. Soulevant la question de l'idealisme, du realisme et du sensualisme dans le livre 15 de «Par dela le Bien et le Mal», l'A. montre que la distinction perception-concept, ou sujet-objet, qui fonde la these de la falsification de l'experience, permet de resoudre le paradoxe de l'apparence et de la realite au sein du perspectivisme cognitif de Nie…
Containment Analyticity and Kant’s Problem of Synthetic Judgment
It Adds Up After All: Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic in Light of the Traditional Logic 1
Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is “contained in” the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in w…
Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption
Nietzsche on Strength and Achieving Individuality
Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration
This chapter examines individual redemption, showing that the Christian concept can be replaced with the replacement becoming superior to the original. It looks at Friedrich Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" thought experiment, in which the reader is asked to imagine how she would react if informed that she will live her life over again, and indeed continue to do so an infinite number of times. To greet this news with ecstasy would be to indicate …
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most influential, provocative, and challenging work of ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, fourteen leading philosophers offer fresh insights into many of the work's central questions: How did our dominant values originate and what functions do they really serve? What future does the concept of 'evil' have - and can it be revalued? What sorts of virtues and ideals does Nietzsche advocat…
On the nobility of Nietzsche’s priests
This chapter aims to make a limited exegetical point about the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), and then to trace its consequences for Nietzsche's argument about the historical transformation that produced our current altruistic morality. The textual point is this: the priests who figure importantly in Nietzsche's story are intended to be unambiguous instances of the noble character type; they are not to be understood as slaves, …
What is a Nietzschean Self?1
The nature of the self is contested within Nietzsche scholarship. Many texts suggest skeptical eliminativism or reduction of the self to sub-personal drives. But core Nietzschean doctrines (self-overcoming, perspectivist objectivity) seem to require substantial self-management, and Kantians insist that only a separate, transcendental self could play this role. This chapter resists both naturalistic reductionism and transcendentalism. Through anal…
Love and the Moral Psychology of the Hegelian Nietzsche: Comments on Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy
Pippin treats Nietzsche's moral psychology as the key to his philosophy. Three aspects of the psychology are meant to bear this weight: (1) a critical and deflationary, but irreducibly hermeneutic, conception of the nature of moral psychology itself; (2) a thesis that eros is central to Nietzsche's theory of valuing; and (3) an expressivist theory of action, which replaces the causal role of intention with an interpretive notion of expression in …
The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant's Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics
Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments underwrites a powerful argument against Leibnizian–Wolffian metaphysics. That traditional metaphysics promised to reveal the rational structure of the world by representing all truth as conceptual, flowing from logically perspicuous "containment" relations among concepts. Such a system would be analytic, sensu Kant. But Kant shows that scientifically indispensable parts of our knowledge …
What Is ‘The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness’? Philosophy as a Way of Life in Nietzsche and Montaigne
Robert Pippin has recently raised what he calls ‘the Montaigne problem’ for Nietzsche's philosophy: although Nietzsche advocates a ‘cheerful’ mode of philosophizing for which Montaigne is an exemplar, he signally fails to write with the obvious cheerfulness attained by Montaigne. We explore the moral psychological structure of the cheerfulness Nietzsche values, revealing unexpected complexity in his conception of the attitude. For him, the right …
Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and His Realism
There is no doctrine more central to Kant's philosophy, nor one more confusing in its fundamental workings, nor one more contested within the reception, than transcendental idealism. In Manifest Reality,1 Lucy Allais develops an interpretation of the doctrine that manages to be genuinely novel and philosophically level-headed, while still rendering Kant's idealism sufficiently radical to have provoked all the controversy in the first place. The b…
The Psychology of Perspectivism: A Question for Nietzsche Studies Now
This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2 (Autumn 2018), in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The…
Nietzschean Autonomy and the Meaning of the “Sovereign Individual”
This paper has two goals, one narrower and one wider. The limited goal is to address an interpretive dispute over the Genealogy ’s description of the “sovereign individual,” a character type whose features bear on Nietzsche’s distinctive conceptions of conscience, promising, and what it is to take responsibility for oneself. The wider goal is to characterize Nietzschean autonomy. The basic idea is that the meaning of the sovereign individual emer…
Transcendental idealism as formal idealism
Transcendental idealism is the basic worldview shaping Kant's critical philosophy, but its proper interpretation is enormously contested. I identify five constraints on an adequate interpretation, which collectively stand in apparent tension. These serve to highlight internal difficulties of the view itself, and also to reveal serious challenges for both the more standard phenomenalist and deflationary interpretations, and newer “moderate metaphy…
What is Nietzschean about Nietzsche’s perspectivism? Preliminary reflections
Nietzsche’s perspectivism has received restricted and unrestricted interpretations. The latter take the cognitive effects of ‘perspectives’ to be pervasive and general; the former argue they are restricted to special subject matters, have limited effects, or are not essentially cognitive at all. I argue on textual grounds that Nietzsche was committed to the unrestricted view. Comparison to A.W. Moore’s treatment of perspectival representation in …
Michael L. Friedman (1947–2025)
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Epistemology (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel (13 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (11 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Metaphysics (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (4 works)