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Books > Philosophy
This book provides a new approach to a major figure in Western
Philosophy.This important new book explores the ethical theory of
Friedrich Nietzsche in light of recent work done in the philosophy
of mind. Craig Dove examines issues of free will, communication,
the way in which we construct the self, and the implications of all
these for ethics. After dismissing what he calls the 'soul
hypothesis', Nietzsche is left with a problem: how do we explain
the sense of unity and continuity most of us experience as our
identity?Drawing on recent work in cognitive science and philosophy
of mind, this study shows that Nietzsche's tentative suggestions in
the late nineteenth century have been supported by late twentieth
century research. Arguing that work done in the philosophy of mind
by Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett helps to illuminate
Nietzsche's positive ethical doctrine, "Dove" goes on to show that
recent work has not adequately thought through the implications for
ethics, while Nietzsche has already accomplished precisely that.
This is an important and original contribution to an ongoing
debate.
Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics.
They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they
elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and religions, for
example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one
against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates
and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and
redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many
perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive
naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans,
natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually
conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or
event-storm clouds forming, nature natured-is self-differentiating,
self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or
transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise
anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had
access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond
reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is
reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience,
with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural
processes?
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