Maudemarie Clark
Biographic Data
| ID | 3874037 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maudemarie Clark |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maudemarie |
| FAMILY NAME | Clark |
| SIGNATURE | CLARK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together
Although Elijah Millgram identifies analytic philosophers as his “tribe,” he doesn’t have much use for the analytically competent work that has sparked the widely recognized improvement of Nietzsche scholarship over the last several decades. Such work, he complains, tends not to recognize that Nietzsche “writes funny” (2). It reads him “straight,” reconstructing his books on the “deeply misguided” assumption that he actually had views or beliefs.…
What Is Consciousness and Does Nietzsche Really Think It Is Unimportant
What does Nietzsche mean by consciousness, and does he really consider it unimportant? And if he doesn’t, why does he make so many disparaging remarks about it? In this article the author considers and rejects Mattia Riccardi’s recent claim that Gay Science (GS) 354, Nietzsche’s most important passage on consciousness, is concerned only with reflective or Rconsciousness. The article shows that GS 354 attempts to explain why mental states ever bec…
Nietzsche: Old and New Questions
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…
Perspectivism and Falsification Revisited: Nietzsche, Nehamas, and Me
In this article, I offer the beginning of a new interpretation of Nietzsche's perspectivism, one that restricts the scope of the knowledge to which it applies. I do so by presenting a new reading of one of Nietzsche's most important passages on perspectivism, Genealogy III:12. I arrive at this reading by revisiting Alexander Nehamas's 1985 interpretation of perspectivism, my 1990 alternative to it, and Nehamas's recent criticism of that alternati…
Will to power and sexuality in Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal
This paper challenges a near universal assumption regarding the third treatise of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (GM): that its main concern is to explain the attraction or power of the ascetic ideal. I argue that GM III’s main concern is normative rather than descriptive-explanatory. An earlier paper argues that GM III’s leading question – What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? – is equivalent to the question: What is the value of t…
Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
This chapter develops an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology by comparing it to the one offered by Paul Katsafanas in “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology” (2013). That paper clearly and persuasively sets out the two main options for interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology and develops a new option that seems to combine their advantages and to overcome their disadvantages. The chapter addresses the difference between…
Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics
This book brings together fourteen chapters by a prominent Nietzsche scholar. Most have been published previously, some in obscure venues; three of them are new. The chapters included here focus on Nietzsche’s views on ethics and politics. Four chapters on metaphysics are also included as background to Nietzsche’s theorizing on ethics and politics, and to show connections between the normative concerns of this book and the metaphysical concerns o…
Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality
This chapter shows that Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality is an account not only of the history of morality, but of what morality is. And when we pay attention to the latter account, it becomes plausible that Nietzsche's immoralism is not directed against a concern for justice and the common good, or universal values or various other elements that we may associate with morality, but only against a particular historically conditioned understanding…
Richard Schacht's Nietzsche
In this article, written for a panel presentation celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Schacht's Nietzsche, I examine the perspective from which Schacht wrote his 1983 book. That perspective, I argue, accounts for many virtues of the book, including Schacht's convincing treatment of Nietzsche as a philosopher who deserved to be taken seriously and, in its amazing thoroughness, his demonstration that Nietzsche's thou…
Philosophy and Esotericism
Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines establishes the historical reality of esotericism, or at least the reputation for it, throughout Western and Islamic philosophy until late modernity. But Melzer wants to do much more than that: to establish that there is a whole new world of philosophy to uncover and explore, thus to promote the recovery of “a long lost art of philosophical literacy.” I argue that he fails in this task. Most of the evi…
Individual and Community in Nietzsche's Philosophy
Defending Nietzsche's Soul
We respond here to criticisms of our book, The Soul of Nietzsche's “Beyond Good and Evil” offered by contributors to the Symposium on it in JNS 45.1 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0031]: We defend our interpretation of Plato's soul, and of Plato's reason as “atomistic,” and argue that these points help explain how Nietzsche's theory of the soul can be a refinement of Plato's tripartite account. We defend our account of what w…
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche Was No Lamarckian
It is fast becoming the standard view that Nietzsche accepted Lamarck's now-discredited view concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics. I examine passages that are cited by Richard Schacht as evidence of Nietzsche's Lamarckianism, including GS 99, BGE 262, BGE 264, and TI “Improvers” 2–5, and argue that they do not provide such evidence. I am mainly concerned to show that these passages provide insufficient evidence that Nietzsche em…
Introductions to Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of the most important philosophers of the last two hundred years, whose writings, both published and unpublished, have had a formative influence on virtually all aspects of modern culture. This volume offers introductory essays on all of Nietzsche's completed works and also his unpublished notebooks. The essays address such topics as his criticism of morality and Christianity, his doctrines of the will to po…
The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
This book presents a provocative new interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, arguably Nietzsche's most important work. The problem is that it appears to express merely a loosely connected set of often questionable opinions. Can Nietzsche really be an important philosopher if this is his most important book? Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick address this question with a close reading that emphasizes how Nietzsche writes. They argue that the first…
Suffering and the Affirmation of Life
Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life (2006) purports to fill a gap in our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophical project by explaining why Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement. Reginster is not alone in emphasizing the centrality of life affirmation to Nietzsche's thought. What makes Reginster's book new and original is his systematic approach—his attempt to isolate a core of Nietzsch…
Nietzsche on the Will: An Analysis of BGE 19
Nietzsche is commonly thought to endorse a version of naturalism that debunks the traditional conception of the will; he is thought to deny that willing brings about or causes actions. BGE 19 is interpreted as supporting this understanding of Nietzsche, and Brian Leiter has so interpreted it. This chapter offers an alternative to Leiter's reading of BGE 19, which shows that while it sets out to debunk something about the traditional notion of the…
Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics
This essay begins from the uncontroversial assumption that Nietzsche holds certain ethical or moral values and expresses them in his work. Its question is whether his philosophy allows him to claim objectivity for these values. Many have thought that his metaethical position prohibits him from doing so, that it entails, in Brian Leiter’s words, a denial that “there is any objective vindication for his [or any other] evaluative position.” As Leite…
Nietzsche's Post‐Positivism
Nietzsche's Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future
This important collection of essays, originally published in 2000, the year of the centenary of Nietzsche's death, offers a full assessment of his contribution to philosophy and represents a helpful guide to the current landscape of Nietzsche studies. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche calls on new philosophers to carry on the process of reinterpretation and revaluation that will constitute the philosophy of the future. This reconsideration will b…
Nietzsche's Antidemocratic Rhetoric
On Knowledge, Truth, and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism
Nietzsche expresses his debt to Schopenhauer very clearly Schopenhauer is his ‘great teacher’, his ‘first and only educator’. He is less clear concerning what his philosophy owes to Schopenhauer. He counts ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ in his essay of that title not because of any doctrine he accepted, but because Schopenhauer provided him with a model of the philosophical life; and the passage about his ‘great teacher’ tells us not what he learned …
Friedrich Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality
Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-k…
Nietzsche: Daybreak
Nietzsche: Old and New Questions
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…
Richard Schacht's Nietzsche
In this article, written for a panel presentation celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Schacht's Nietzsche, I examine the perspective from which Schacht wrote his 1983 book. That perspective, I argue, accounts for many virtues of the book, including Schacht's convincing treatment of Nietzsche as a philosopher who deserved to be taken seriously and, in its amazing thoroughness, his demonstration that Nietzsche's thou…
Nietzsche Was No Lamarckian
It is fast becoming the standard view that Nietzsche accepted Lamarck's now-discredited view concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics. I examine passages that are cited by Richard Schacht as evidence of Nietzsche's Lamarckianism, including GS 99, BGE 262, BGE 264, and TI “Improvers” 2–5, and argue that they do not provide such evidence. I am mainly concerned to show that these passages provide insufficient evidence that Nietzsche em…
Nietzsche on truth and philosophy
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche haunts the modern world. His elusive writings with their characteristic combination of trenchant analysis of the modern predicament and suggestive but ambiguous proposals for dealing with it have fascinated generations of artists, scholars, critics, philosophers, and ordinary readers. Maudemarie Clark's highly original study gives a lucid and penetrating analytical account of all the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology …
Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality
Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-k…
Nietzsche: Daybreak
On Knowledge, Truth, and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism
Nietzsche expresses his debt to Schopenhauer very clearly Schopenhauer is his ‘great teacher’, his ‘first and only educator’. He is less clear concerning what his philosophy owes to Schopenhauer. He counts ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ in his essay of that title not because of any doctrine he accepted, but because Schopenhauer provided him with a model of the philosophical life; and the passage about his ‘great teacher’ tells us not what he learned …
Nietzsche's Antidemocratic Rhetoric
Nietzsche's Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future
This important collection of essays, originally published in 2000, the year of the centenary of Nietzsche's death, offers a full assessment of his contribution to philosophy and represents a helpful guide to the current landscape of Nietzsche studies. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche calls on new philosophers to carry on the process of reinterpretation and revaluation that will constitute the philosophy of the future. This reconsideration will b…
Nietzsche's Post‐Positivism
Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics
This essay begins from the uncontroversial assumption that Nietzsche holds certain ethical or moral values and expresses them in his work. Its question is whether his philosophy allows him to claim objectivity for these values. Many have thought that his metaethical position prohibits him from doing so, that it entails, in Brian Leiter’s words, a denial that “there is any objective vindication for his [or any other] evaluative position.” As Leite…
Nietzsche on the Will: An Analysis of BGE 19
Nietzsche is commonly thought to endorse a version of naturalism that debunks the traditional conception of the will; he is thought to deny that willing brings about or causes actions. BGE 19 is interpreted as supporting this understanding of Nietzsche, and Brian Leiter has so interpreted it. This chapter offers an alternative to Leiter's reading of BGE 19, which shows that while it sets out to debunk something about the traditional notion of the…
Introductions to Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of the most important philosophers of the last two hundred years, whose writings, both published and unpublished, have had a formative influence on virtually all aspects of modern culture. This volume offers introductory essays on all of Nietzsche's completed works and also his unpublished notebooks. The essays address such topics as his criticism of morality and Christianity, his doctrines of the will to po…
The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
This book presents a provocative new interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, arguably Nietzsche's most important work. The problem is that it appears to express merely a loosely connected set of often questionable opinions. Can Nietzsche really be an important philosopher if this is his most important book? Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick address this question with a close reading that emphasizes how Nietzsche writes. They argue that the first…
Suffering and the Affirmation of Life
Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life (2006) purports to fill a gap in our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophical project by explaining why Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement. Reginster is not alone in emphasizing the centrality of life affirmation to Nietzsche's thought. What makes Reginster's book new and original is his systematic approach—his attempt to isolate a core of Nietzsch…
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche Was No Lamarckian
It is fast becoming the standard view that Nietzsche accepted Lamarck's now-discredited view concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics. I examine passages that are cited by Richard Schacht as evidence of Nietzsche's Lamarckianism, including GS 99, BGE 262, BGE 264, and TI “Improvers” 2–5, and argue that they do not provide such evidence. I am mainly concerned to show that these passages provide insufficient evidence that Nietzsche em…
Individual and Community in Nietzsche's Philosophy
Defending Nietzsche's Soul
We respond here to criticisms of our book, The Soul of Nietzsche's “Beyond Good and Evil” offered by contributors to the Symposium on it in JNS 45.1 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0031]: We defend our interpretation of Plato's soul, and of Plato's reason as “atomistic,” and argue that these points help explain how Nietzsche's theory of the soul can be a refinement of Plato's tripartite account. We defend our account of what w…
Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
This chapter develops an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology by comparing it to the one offered by Paul Katsafanas in “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology” (2013). That paper clearly and persuasively sets out the two main options for interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology and develops a new option that seems to combine their advantages and to overcome their disadvantages. The chapter addresses the difference between…
Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics
This book brings together fourteen chapters by a prominent Nietzsche scholar. Most have been published previously, some in obscure venues; three of them are new. The chapters included here focus on Nietzsche’s views on ethics and politics. Four chapters on metaphysics are also included as background to Nietzsche’s theorizing on ethics and politics, and to show connections between the normative concerns of this book and the metaphysical concerns o…
Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality
This chapter shows that Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality is an account not only of the history of morality, but of what morality is. And when we pay attention to the latter account, it becomes plausible that Nietzsche's immoralism is not directed against a concern for justice and the common good, or universal values or various other elements that we may associate with morality, but only against a particular historically conditioned understanding…
Richard Schacht's Nietzsche
In this article, written for a panel presentation celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Schacht's Nietzsche, I examine the perspective from which Schacht wrote his 1983 book. That perspective, I argue, accounts for many virtues of the book, including Schacht's convincing treatment of Nietzsche as a philosopher who deserved to be taken seriously and, in its amazing thoroughness, his demonstration that Nietzsche's thou…
Philosophy and Esotericism
Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines establishes the historical reality of esotericism, or at least the reputation for it, throughout Western and Islamic philosophy until late modernity. But Melzer wants to do much more than that: to establish that there is a whole new world of philosophy to uncover and explore, thus to promote the recovery of “a long lost art of philosophical literacy.” I argue that he fails in this task. Most of the evi…
Will to power and sexuality in Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal
This paper challenges a near universal assumption regarding the third treatise of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (GM): that its main concern is to explain the attraction or power of the ascetic ideal. I argue that GM III’s main concern is normative rather than descriptive-explanatory. An earlier paper argues that GM III’s leading question – What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? – is equivalent to the question: What is the value of t…
Philosophy (25 works) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel (24 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (12 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) (7 works) · Morality (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Psychoanalysis (6 works)