Paul Katsafanas
Biographic Data
| ID | 460300 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Katsafanas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Katsafanas |
| SIGNATURE | KATSAFANAS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2588-0342 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Devotion and deep commitment
In the bustle of human life, making a choice is only the beginning. You decide on a career, take up a cause, enter into a romantic relationship, begin an artistic project, start an exercise regimen
Narratives of love and hate: Nietzsche on positive and negative moralities
Nietzsche distinguishes between moralities that prioritize negation and those that prioritize affirmation. Moreover, he claims that this negation/affirmation distinction applies at the level of individual identities: some people define themselves through opposition, fixating on what they reject, whereas others orient toward what they conceive as good. While the negation/affirmation distinction plays a prominent role in several of Nietzsche’s argu…
Grievance politics and identities of resentment
What’s so bad about fanaticism
Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy
Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and attempted to define the distinctive qualities of the fanatic, whom Winston Churchill described as "someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Yet despite fanaticism's role in the long history of social discord, human conflict, and political violence, it remains a rela…
What Makes the Affirmation of Life Difficult?
First author draft
The Fanatic and the Last Man
Suppose we accept Nietzsche’s claim that critical reflection undermines our evaluative commitments. Then it seems that we are left with a pair of unappealing options: either we engage in critical reflection and find our evaluative commitments becoming etiolated; or we somehow immunize certain evaluative commitments from the effects of critical reflection. Nietzsche considers both of these paths, labeling the person who results from the first path…
Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals
Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive-but often hidden-role in human life. Devotion typ…
Nietzsche’s Moral Methodology
Nietzsche is widely reputed to have a novel approach to moral philosophy. Georg Simmel called him the "Copernicus of philosophical ethics," presumably intending to convey by this that Nietzsche recentered the perspective from which philosophical ethics is conducted (Simmel 1992: 124). And Nietzsche himself agreed: "I hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring" (BGE 228),1 he writes, and presents himself …
The Antichrist as a Guide to Nietzsche’s Mature Ethical Theory
I argue that the rarely discussed Antichrist can serve as perhaps the best guide to Nietzsche’s mature ethical theory. Commentators often argue or assume that while Nietzsche makes many critical points about traditional morality, he cannot be offering a positive ethical theory of his own. This, I argue, is a mistake. The Antichrist offers a substantive ethical theory. It explicitly articulates Nietzsche’s positive ethical principles, shows why th…
Nietzsche’s account of self-conscious agency
This essay is an overview of Nietzsche’s philosophy of action. I discuss the central features of Nietzsche’s account and the ways in which it departs from standard accounts. Section 1 discusses Nietzsche’s view of the opacity of human action. I focus on the way in which the agent’s experience of the world is shaped by unnoticed and unconscious factors. Section 2 asks what role self-consciousness has in the production of action. Section 3 turns to…
Moral Critique and Philosophical Psychology
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…
Constitutivism about Practical Reasons
This chapter introduces constitutivism about practical reason, which is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. According to this view, action has a certain structural feature—a constitutive aim, principle, or standard—that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to …
The Nietzschean Mind
"Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century. As a German philosopher and cultural critic his work has had and continues to have a significant influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. The Nietzschean Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Com…
The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious
Nietzsche's works are replete with discussions of moral psychology, but to date there has been no systematic analysis of his account. How does Nietzsche understand human motivation, deliberation, agency, and selfhood? How does his account of the unconscious inform these topics? What is Nietzsche's conception of freedom, and how do we become free? Should freedom be a goal for all of us? How does—and how should—the individual relate to his social c…
Response to Bernard Reginster, Jorah Dannenberg, and Andrew Huddleston
This is a response to Bernard Reginster's, Jorah Dannenberg's, and Andrew Huddleston's comments published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47.3, on Agency and the Foundations of Ethics. I address the main points raised in their critiques: Dannenberg's concerns about whether I have adequately characterized nihilism and his argument that Nietzschean constitutivism would be of no help to the nihilist; Reginster's argument that constitutivism offe…
Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics
Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics is a collection of eleven previously published papers and three unpublished conference papers. These papers were published or presented over the course of almost three decades (1987–2014).By way of introduction, a bit of context: I think it's fair to say that, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the literature on Nietzsche was rife with philosophically unsophisticated interpretations and rather cr…
Value, Affect, Drive
Nietzsche appears to identify values with the agent's drives and affects. This generates a puzzle, for an agent's drives and affects are often in conflict with the agent's self-proclaimed values. This chapter investigates this puzzle by reconstructing Nietzsche's account of value. According to the view it defends, an agent values X iff (i) the agent has a drive-induced affective orientation toward X, and (ii) the agent does not disapprove of this…
Kant and Nietzsche on Self-Knowledge
thinks that our mental lives are entirely transparent to us, whereas Nietzsche claims that the mind is utterly opaque. Kant believes that we usually know what we are doing and why, placing great faith in our introspective capacities; Nietzsche believes, to put it in his own words, that “actions are never what they appear to be... all actions are essentially unknown ” (D 116). In short: Kant and Nietzsche are antipodes, the one emphasizing self-kn…
On Homuncular Drives and the Structure of the Nietzschean Self
This article critiques three aspects of Clark and Dudrick's book. First, I question Clark and Dudrick's claim that Nietzsche recognizes a distinct will to value. Second, I argue that Clark and Dudrick's analysis of Nietzschean drives is philosophically and textually problematic. Third, I investigate their claim that Nietzsche understands the self as a “normative ordering” of drives, which they distinguish from a “causal ordering.” I raise some do…
Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
This article examines Nietzsche’s notion of a drive. It addresses three main questions: first, what is a drive? Second, what type of awareness do we have when we are being moved by a drive? Third, what is the relationship between being moved by a drive and reflectively choosing to perform an action? A drive is a disposition that lead agents to evaluative orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent’s perceptions, affects, and …
Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for Ethics
Nietzsche claims that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). What are these “fundamental problems”? I provide a partial answer by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche's account of value. I argue that Nietzsche's ethical theory is based upon the idea that power has a privileged normative status: power is the one value in terms of which all others values are to be assessed. Yet how could pow…
Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism
Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of action. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics explains the constitutivist strategy and argues that the attractions of this view are considerable: constitutivism promises to resolve longstanding philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims. Yet constitutivism faces a challenge: it must…
Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency
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…
Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism
Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of action. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics explains the constitutivist strategy and argues that the attractions of this view are considerable: constitutivism promises to resolve longstanding philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims. Yet constitutivism faces a challenge: it must…
Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean Version of Constitutivism
Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency
Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals
Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive-but often hidden-role in human life. Devotion typ…
Constitutivism about Practical Reasons
This chapter introduces constitutivism about practical reason, which is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. According to this view, action has a certain structural feature—a constitutive aim, principle, or standard—that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to …
Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for Ethics
Nietzsche claims that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). What are these “fundamental problems”? I provide a partial answer by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche's account of value. I argue that Nietzsche's ethical theory is based upon the idea that power has a privileged normative status: power is the one value in terms of which all others values are to be assessed. Yet how could pow…
What’s so bad about fanaticism
Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy
Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and attempted to define the distinctive qualities of the fanatic, whom Winston Churchill described as "someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Yet despite fanaticism's role in the long history of social discord, human conflict, and political violence, it remains a rela…
Nietzsche's Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization
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…
The relevance of history for moral philosophy
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality occupies an unstable position in philosophical thought: it oscillates between seeming damning and irrelevant. This chapter argues that Nietzsche's aim in the Genealogy is to show that modern morality has systematically broken the connection between perceptions of increased power, and actual increases in power. It introduces the currently dominant interpretation of the Genealogy, which treats the text as es…
The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller
This paper examines Nietzsche's concept of unified agency. I argue that (1) Nietzschean unity is an account of the distinction between genuine actions and mere behaviors, rather than between free and unfree actions; (2) unity refers to a relation between drives and conscious thought; and (3) unity obtains when the agent's attitude toward her own action is stable under the revelation of further information about the action's etiology. I show that …
Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean Version of Constitutivism
Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency
Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
This article examines Nietzsche’s notion of a drive. It addresses three main questions: first, what is a drive? Second, what type of awareness do we have when we are being moved by a drive? Third, what is the relationship between being moved by a drive and reflectively choosing to perform an action? A drive is a disposition that lead agents to evaluative orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent’s perceptions, affects, and …
Philosophical Psychology as a Basis for Ethics
Nietzsche claims that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). What are these “fundamental problems”? I provide a partial answer by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche's account of value. I argue that Nietzsche's ethical theory is based upon the idea that power has a privileged normative status: power is the one value in terms of which all others values are to be assessed. Yet how could pow…
Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism
Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of action. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics explains the constitutivist strategy and argues that the attractions of this view are considerable: constitutivism promises to resolve longstanding philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims. Yet constitutivism faces a challenge: it must…
On Homuncular Drives and the Structure of the Nietzschean Self
This article critiques three aspects of Clark and Dudrick's book. First, I question Clark and Dudrick's claim that Nietzsche recognizes a distinct will to value. Second, I argue that Clark and Dudrick's analysis of Nietzschean drives is philosophically and textually problematic. Third, I investigate their claim that Nietzsche understands the self as a “normative ordering” of drives, which they distinguish from a “causal ordering.” I raise some do…
Value, Affect, Drive
Nietzsche appears to identify values with the agent's drives and affects. This generates a puzzle, for an agent's drives and affects are often in conflict with the agent's self-proclaimed values. This chapter investigates this puzzle by reconstructing Nietzsche's account of value. According to the view it defends, an agent values X iff (i) the agent has a drive-induced affective orientation toward X, and (ii) the agent does not disapprove of this…
Kant and Nietzsche on Self-Knowledge
thinks that our mental lives are entirely transparent to us, whereas Nietzsche claims that the mind is utterly opaque. Kant believes that we usually know what we are doing and why, placing great faith in our introspective capacities; Nietzsche believes, to put it in his own words, that “actions are never what they appear to be... all actions are essentially unknown ” (D 116). In short: Kant and Nietzsche are antipodes, the one emphasizing self-kn…
The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious
Nietzsche's works are replete with discussions of moral psychology, but to date there has been no systematic analysis of his account. How does Nietzsche understand human motivation, deliberation, agency, and selfhood? How does his account of the unconscious inform these topics? What is Nietzsche's conception of freedom, and how do we become free? Should freedom be a goal for all of us? How does—and how should—the individual relate to his social c…
Response to Bernard Reginster, Jorah Dannenberg, and Andrew Huddleston
This is a response to Bernard Reginster's, Jorah Dannenberg's, and Andrew Huddleston's comments published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47.3, on Agency and the Foundations of Ethics. I address the main points raised in their critiques: Dannenberg's concerns about whether I have adequately characterized nihilism and his argument that Nietzschean constitutivism would be of no help to the nihilist; Reginster's argument that constitutivism offe…
Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics
Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics is a collection of eleven previously published papers and three unpublished conference papers. These papers were published or presented over the course of almost three decades (1987–2014).By way of introduction, a bit of context: I think it's fair to say that, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the literature on Nietzsche was rife with philosophically unsophisticated interpretations and rather cr…
The Nietzschean Mind
"Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century. As a German philosopher and cultural critic his work has had and continues to have a significant influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. The Nietzschean Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Com…
The Antichrist as a Guide to Nietzsche’s Mature Ethical Theory
I argue that the rarely discussed Antichrist can serve as perhaps the best guide to Nietzsche’s mature ethical theory. Commentators often argue or assume that while Nietzsche makes many critical points about traditional morality, he cannot be offering a positive ethical theory of his own. This, I argue, is a mistake. The Antichrist offers a substantive ethical theory. It explicitly articulates Nietzsche’s positive ethical principles, shows why th…
Nietzsche’s account of self-conscious agency
This essay is an overview of Nietzsche’s philosophy of action. I discuss the central features of Nietzsche’s account and the ways in which it departs from standard accounts. Section 1 discusses Nietzsche’s view of the opacity of human action. I focus on the way in which the agent’s experience of the world is shaped by unnoticed and unconscious factors. Section 2 asks what role self-consciousness has in the production of action. Section 3 turns to…
Moral Critique and Philosophical Psychology
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…
Constitutivism about Practical Reasons
This chapter introduces constitutivism about practical reason, which is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. According to this view, action has a certain structural feature—a constitutive aim, principle, or standard—that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to …
Nietzsche’s Moral Methodology
Nietzsche is widely reputed to have a novel approach to moral philosophy. Georg Simmel called him the "Copernicus of philosophical ethics," presumably intending to convey by this that Nietzsche recentered the perspective from which philosophical ethics is conducted (Simmel 1992: 124). And Nietzsche himself agreed: "I hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring" (BGE 228),1 he writes, and presents himself …
What Makes the Affirmation of Life Difficult?
First author draft
The Fanatic and the Last Man
Suppose we accept Nietzsche’s claim that critical reflection undermines our evaluative commitments. Then it seems that we are left with a pair of unappealing options: either we engage in critical reflection and find our evaluative commitments becoming etiolated; or we somehow immunize certain evaluative commitments from the effects of critical reflection. Nietzsche considers both of these paths, labeling the person who results from the first path…
Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals
Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive-but often hidden-role in human life. Devotion typ…
Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy
Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and attempted to define the distinctive qualities of the fanatic, whom Winston Churchill described as "someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". Yet despite fanaticism's role in the long history of social discord, human conflict, and political violence, it remains a rela…
Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel (22 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)