The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
This book was written by Timothy McWhirter and published in 2025. It examines the relation between the maximum power principle developed by Alfred Lotka and H. T. Odum and the concept of the will to power developed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It discusses the work of the scientists and philosophers that influenced the…
This paper was written by Paul Katsafanas and published in 2011. In this paper, Katsafanas develops a unique interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaethical position based on a version of constitutivism: the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of agency. The abstract states: “This paper has two goals. First,…
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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 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…
This book was written by Friedrich Nietzsche and published in 1887. In it Nietzsche develops a typology of moral values that describes whether they foster the growth and flourishing of life, or they undermine its growth and are a sign of the degeneration of life (GM Preface, 3, 6). In Beyond Good and Evil, published…
This book was written by Friedrich Nietzsche and published in 1886. Among many other things, it contains Nietzsche’s famous argument for his concept of the will to power (aphorism 36), his claim that living things seek to discharge their strength rather than just survive (13), his description of life growing “not out of any morality…