The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
This paper was written by Charles A. S. Hall and Timothy McWhirter and published in 2023. It provides a review of the development and use of the maximum power principle in evolutionary theory, ecology, and economics. It includes a discussion of how Alfred Lotka and H. T. Odum both described the maximum power principle applying…
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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 book was written by Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick and published in 2012. The authors provide a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil. In this book, Nietzsche provides his famous argument for the concept of the will to power, the version that applies to biotic and abiotic systems. Clark has argued…
This paper was written by Brian Leiter and published in 2013. In this paper, Leiter provides a very interesting and valuable interpretation of many aspects of Nietzsche’s naturalism. However, given the focus of the investigation on this website, one aspect of this paper does stand out: Leiter’s view of what he calls “the metaphysics of…
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 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…