James A Mollison
Biographic Data
| ID | 6590926 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James A Mollison |
| GIVEN NAMES | James A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mollison |
| SIGNATURE | MOLLISON J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2962-6504 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Deleuze’s Encounter with Kierkegaard: Transcendence, Subjectivity and Repetition
This article examines Difference and Repetition’s oblique engagement with Kierkegaard. After canvassing Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition, I reconstruct Deleuze’s disagreement with it, arguing that Deleuze resists Kierkegaard’s view of subjectivity rather than his faith in a transcendent God. Regarding Deleuze’s agreement with Kierkegaard, I contend that he reads Kierkegaard’s opposition to Hegel and emphasis on the future into Nietzsche’s eter…
Paradigmatically active: Why Nietzschean drives are not dispositions
In this article, I argue against the scholarly consensus that Nietzsche understands drives as dispositions toward characteristic modes of behavior. After showing that Nietzsche’s texts do not support construing drives as dispositions, I draw out three consequences of this view: it undermines Nietzsche’s analysis of how drives take up objects, risks rendering drives causally otiose, and makes drives’ relations with affects needlessly complex. Thes…
“An unreserved yea‐saying even to suffering”: A skeptical defense of Nietzschean life affirmation
After examining the problem that gratuitous suffering poses for Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation, I mount a skeptical response to this problem on Nietzsche's behalf. I then consider an orthogonal objection to Nietzschean life affirmation, which argues that the need to justify life is symptomatic of life denial and show how strengthening the skeptical defense sidesteps this worry. Nietzsche's skepticism about our all‐too‐human, epistemic pos…
Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life
Daniel Came’s most recent edited collection features original essays from leading figures in the field. As most of its chapters are well-written and well-argued, it will interest Nietzsche scholars generally. It’s difficult to narrow the volume’s intended audience much further than this, however. The source of this difficulty is not merely titular, though one wonders what aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy could not plausibly be yoked under the du…
Against Focusing on the Internal Conditions of Nietzschean Greatness
After reconstructing three arguments for Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self as complex, this article clarifies some of greatness’s psychological conditions. It then offers three arguments for why we should not focus on these internal conditions when seeking to verify or to achieve greatness. First, Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self renders introspection too coarse-grained and error-prone to verify the subtle type of unity req…
A Leibniz-Informed Approach to Nietzsche’s Drive Psychology
Despite drives’ importance for Nietzsche’s explanation of individuals’ values, controversies persist over how to interpret Nietzsche’s attribution of normative capacities to the drives themselves. On one reading, drives evaluate their aims and recognize the normative authority of other drives’ aims. On another, drives’ normative properties reduce to nonnormative, causal properties. Neither approach is satisfying. The former commits Nietzsche to t…
Deleuze’s Nietzschean Mutations: From the Will to Power and the Overman to Desiring-Production and Nomadism
This article examines Nietzsche’s enduring influence on Deleuze by showing how the interpretation advanced in Nietzsche and Philosophy informs Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. I analyse Deleuze’s reading of the will to power as a typology of forces and his interpretation of the Overman as a pinnacle of creative activity with an eye towards demonstrating that these are not merely Deleuzian creations but are also defensible interpretations of Ni…
Nietzsche contra stoicism: Naturalism and value, suffering and amor fati
Nietzsche criticizes Stoicism for overstating the significance of its ethical ideal of rational self-sufficiency and for undervaluing pain and passion when pursuing an unconditional acceptance of fate. Apparent affinities between Stoicism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his celebration of self-mastery and his pursuit of amor fati, lead some scholars to conclude that Nietzsche cannot advance these criticisms without contradicting himself. I…
Nietzsche Apostle
Far from discouraged by the proliferation of controversies over the last half-century of Nietzsche scholarship, Peter Sloterdijk considers Nietzsche's ability to elude definitive interpretation to be evidence of his status as a classic (Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 3). Consequently, Sloterdijk does not attempt to resolve exegetical difficu…
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Nietzsche Apostle
Far from discouraged by the proliferation of controversies over the last half-century of Nietzsche scholarship, Peter Sloterdijk considers Nietzsche's ability to elude definitive interpretation to be evidence of his status as a classic (Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 3). Consequently, Sloterdijk does not attempt to resolve exegetical difficu…
Nietzsche contra stoicism: Naturalism and value, suffering and amor fati
Nietzsche criticizes Stoicism for overstating the significance of its ethical ideal of rational self-sufficiency and for undervaluing pain and passion when pursuing an unconditional acceptance of fate. Apparent affinities between Stoicism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his celebration of self-mastery and his pursuit of amor fati, lead some scholars to conclude that Nietzsche cannot advance these criticisms without contradicting himself. I…
Deleuze’s Nietzschean Mutations: From the Will to Power and the Overman to Desiring-Production and Nomadism
This article examines Nietzsche’s enduring influence on Deleuze by showing how the interpretation advanced in Nietzsche and Philosophy informs Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. I analyse Deleuze’s reading of the will to power as a typology of forces and his interpretation of the Overman as a pinnacle of creative activity with an eye towards demonstrating that these are not merely Deleuzian creations but are also defensible interpretations of Ni…
Against Focusing on the Internal Conditions of Nietzschean Greatness
After reconstructing three arguments for Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self as complex, this article clarifies some of greatness’s psychological conditions. It then offers three arguments for why we should not focus on these internal conditions when seeking to verify or to achieve greatness. First, Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self renders introspection too coarse-grained and error-prone to verify the subtle type of unity req…
A Leibniz-Informed Approach to Nietzsche’s Drive Psychology
Despite drives’ importance for Nietzsche’s explanation of individuals’ values, controversies persist over how to interpret Nietzsche’s attribution of normative capacities to the drives themselves. On one reading, drives evaluate their aims and recognize the normative authority of other drives’ aims. On another, drives’ normative properties reduce to nonnormative, causal properties. Neither approach is satisfying. The former commits Nietzsche to t…
“An unreserved yea‐saying even to suffering”: A skeptical defense of Nietzschean life affirmation
After examining the problem that gratuitous suffering poses for Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation, I mount a skeptical response to this problem on Nietzsche's behalf. I then consider an orthogonal objection to Nietzschean life affirmation, which argues that the need to justify life is symptomatic of life denial and show how strengthening the skeptical defense sidesteps this worry. Nietzsche's skepticism about our all‐too‐human, epistemic pos…
Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life
Daniel Came’s most recent edited collection features original essays from leading figures in the field. As most of its chapters are well-written and well-argued, it will interest Nietzsche scholars generally. It’s difficult to narrow the volume’s intended audience much further than this, however. The source of this difficulty is not merely titular, though one wonders what aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy could not plausibly be yoked under the du…
Paradigmatically active: Why Nietzschean drives are not dispositions
In this article, I argue against the scholarly consensus that Nietzsche understands drives as dispositions toward characteristic modes of behavior. After showing that Nietzsche’s texts do not support construing drives as dispositions, I draw out three consequences of this view: it undermines Nietzsche’s analysis of how drives take up objects, risks rendering drives causally otiose, and makes drives’ relations with affects needlessly complex. Thes…
Deleuze’s Encounter with Kierkegaard: Transcendence, Subjectivity and Repetition
This article examines Difference and Repetition’s oblique engagement with Kierkegaard. After canvassing Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition, I reconstruct Deleuze’s disagreement with it, arguing that Deleuze resists Kierkegaard’s view of subjectivity rather than his faith in a transcendent God. Regarding Deleuze’s agreement with Kierkegaard, I contend that he reads Kierkegaard’s opposition to Hegel and emphasis on the future into Nietzsche’s eter…
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel (7 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Psychoanalysis (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Literature (3 works) · Artificial Intelligence (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works)