The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
This paper was written by Brian Leiter and published in 2000. Leiter argues that philosophers that argue that Nietzsche criticizes moral values from a position that is privileged in some way, using a form of realism or a non-realism, are incorrect. Leiter concludes that in his revaluation of moral values “Nietzsche’s own evaluative perspective in…
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This article was written by Nadeem Hussain and published in 2013. In it Hussain revises the view of Nietzsche’s metaethical position that he described six years earlier, in his article “Honest Illusions: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.” He reviews the different metaethical positions he and other philosophers have attributed to Nietzsche and he finds them…
This paper was written by Nadeem Hussain and published in 2007. It outlines the textual challenges for accurately interpreting the metaethical position implied by Nietzsche’s critique of morality. He illustrates the problems with the interpretation that holds the will to power is, itself, a fundamental moral value. He describes this as a form of moral…
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This paper was written by Maudemarie Clark and published in 2000. In it, Clark seeks to clarify and improve the position on the will to power that she initially argued for 17 years earlier in her paper “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power” (1983), where she argued that we should view Nietzsche’s ontological doctrine…
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This paper was written by Maudemarie Clark and published in 1983. In the first paragraph of this paper, she writes: “There is an apparent contradiction between Nietzsche’s view of knowledge and what I shall call his ontological doctrine of the will to power, the doctrine that the world is will to power. The proposal I…
This book was written by Maudemarie Clark and published in 1990. In the preface, she writes: “Nietzsche says much about truth that is interesting and quite influential. As I argue in Chapter 1, it is also problematic and perhaps even self-contradictory. In this study I attempt to make sense of it, and I emphasize aspects…
This paper was written by Christian Emden and published in 2016. The abstract states: “The ‘will to power’ remains one of Nietzsche’s most controversial philosophical concepts. In this article I argue that the will to power ties in directly with Nietzsche’s naturalistic discussion of normativity. The link between the will to power and normativity cannot…
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This book was written by Christian Emden and published in 2014. Among many other things, it provides the most comprehensive and detailed investigation of the work of the scientists that influenced Nietzsche’s development of the concept of the will to power. He argues that the biological version of that concept plays a fundamental role in…
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This book was written by John Richardson and published in 2004. It illustrates the various ways in which Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin. Additionally, it focuses on describing Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power as a biological principle, rather than an ontological principle, notwithstanding his focus on this ontological version of the principle in…
This book was written by John Richardson and published in 1996. It provides one of the most comprehensive and detailed discussions of the ontological version of Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. Most philosophers in the secondary literature on Nietzsche find this version of the will to power empirically implausible, and they instead tend…