The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 68 pdf

Having also become persuaded of the fundamentally non-rational character of the world, life, and history, Nietzsche took the basic challenge of philoso-phy to be that of overcoming both

A H Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and

Early Medieval Philosophy (London, 1967).

R B Harris (ed.), The Structure of Being (Norfolk, Va., 1982).

G Reale, The Schools of the Imperial Age, tr J R Catan (Albany, NY,

1992)

R T Wallis, Neoplatonism (London, 1972).

neo-pragmatism. Recent philosophical movement

embracing a radical form of social and practical

contextu-alism that denies the possibility of universal conceptions of

truth or reality Neo-pragmatism emerged as a critical

reaction to traditional and *analytic philosophy Building

mainly on Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars,

Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

initiated a return to a *pragmatism Because all

philosoph-ical attempts to distinguish in principle between analytphilosoph-ical

and empirical, necessary and contingent, universal and

historical, reality and fiction are taken to have failed, truth

and meaning are taken to be nothing but moments of

spe-cific social practices Philosophical questions, however,

remain: How can the social pragmatist avoid self-refuting

relativism? Is all social practice just ‘coping with entities’,

regardless of whether these are objects or persons? And

how about the ethical and political consequences of a

‘frank ethnocentrism’ (Rorty) that privileges one’s own

interpretative perspective without constraint? h.-h.k

Richard Rorty, ‘The World Well Lost’, in Consequences of

Pragma-tism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis, 1982).

neo-realism:see New Realism.

neo-Thomism. ‘Neo-Thomism’ is an imprecise term

applied since the nineteenth century to diverse authors,

doctrines, procedures, and topics that have or claim to

have some relation to the thought of Thomas Aquinas Its

origin is usually located in Pope Leo XIII’s letter Æterni

Patris (1879) The letter urges Catholic philosophers to

demonstrate the existence and attributes of *God and to

combat the speculative and practical errors of modern

philosophy by reappropriating the teachings of the major

Christian writers from the European Middle Ages Leo

picks out as chief among these writers Thomas Aquinas,

who is supposed to have unified in his teaching the best of

patristic and medieval theology While Æterni Patris did

mobilize large-scale ecclesiastical support for a new

*Thomism, its programme had been worked out in

Catholic educational circles during the previous four

decades For example, a number of thinkers in or about

the Jesuits’ Roman and German Colleges began in the

1840s and 1850s to advocate a systematic Thomism as the

only philosophically adequate alternative to various

mod-ern *empiricisms and *idealisms Among these thinkers

were Matteo Liberatore and Joseph Kleutgen If

Libera-tore represents the Italian side of the new movement,

with its combative sense of philosophical system,

Kleut-gen brought to Rome from Münster and Fribourg an

attention to the historical context for medieval thought

Æterni Patris ratified and institutionalized the labour of

these and similar teachers

Of course, by the date of Æterni Patris neo-Thomism

was already beginning to break up into camps These camps were partly determined by institutional arrange-ment and partly by avowed task or purpose So, for example, the different religious orders maintained separate educational systems and tended to teach rather different versions of Thomism Some orders were also concerned

to promote their own medieval authors as alternatives to Thomas The Franciscans regularly espoused Bonaven-ture or Scotus, while a few Jesuits taught from Suarez Again, neo-Thomism from its inception was both exeget-ical and constructive or polemexeget-ical If it wanted to be con-sidered Thomism, it had to ground itself in a historically sensitive reading of Thomas If it wanted to be a neo-Thomism, it had to extract from Thomas principles or arguments useful in dispute with modern philosophies

By the early decades of this century there were neo-Thomists who were principally known as able interpreters of medieval thought and neo-Thomists who were principally known as builders of ‘Thomistic’ systems and debaters of modern doctrines The interpreters would include Martin Grabmann, Pierre Mandonnet, and Maurice De Wulf; the builders and debaters, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Désiré Mercier Some neo-Thomists, most famously Étienne Gilson, were able to

do both

The principal neo-Thomists tend to be classified by their attachment to some particular theme or preoccupation One persistent theme has been the engagement with epistemological questions raised by Kant and the neo-Kantians This kind of neo-Thomism, called ‘transcenden-tal Thomism’, is associated with Joseph Maréchal and Karl Rahner A different kind of transcendental analysis, more driven by the concerns of experimental science, is offered in the Thomist writings of Bernard J F Lonergan Another class of neo-Thomists is associated with questions

in metaphysics and chiefly with expounding the Thomist

doctrine about being (esse) Writers put into this class

include Gilson and Jacques Maritain But these classifica-tions are at best a preliminary guide to complex authors, each of whom wrote on a wide range of philosophical topics

The Roman Catholic Church’s institutional support for neo-Thomism was much weakend during and after the second Vatican Council (1961–5) Since then, neo-Thomism has tended to become largely historical and to

be submerged in the study of the history of medieval

*neo-Kantianism

Gerard A McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for

a Unitary Method (New York, 1989).

Anton C Pegis (ed.), A Gilson Reader (New York, 1957).

Netherlands philosophy As one would expect of a phil-osophy within a culture which has always been so open to foreign influences, the Dutch philosophical tradition has given rise to many interesting variations on well-known

650 Neoplatonism

international movements It is in many respects an ideal

microcosm of Western European philosophical

develop-ments from the thirteenth century onwards

Siger of Brabant (1240–81), as Dante realized when he

placed him in the Fourth Heaven, and allowed Aquinas to

characterize him as one of the noblest champions of

Chris-tian philosophy, left works which take us to the very heart

of the thirteenth-century confrontation between

Augus-tinianism and *Aristotelianism Arnout Geulincx (1624– 69)

provides us with a unique insight into the transition from

Descartes to Spinoza

If Dutch philosophy has been very open to foreign

influence, it is also true that many Dutch thinkers have

had at least a considerable influence upon European

intel-lectual history Spinoza is of course the outstanding case

(His influence on philosophy within the Netherlands,

however, by contrast with that of Descartes, was minimal

prior to the second half of the nineteenth century Even

then, it consisted of very little more than free-wheeling

speculative interpretations of the first book of the Ethics.)

Spinoza was by no means the only Dutch philosopher

who affected the history of philosophy Rudolf Agricola

(1444–85), now known mainly on account of the ways in

which his *humanism foreshadows that of Erasmus, did in

fact write the first work to break decisively with the

medieval logical tradition Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) laid

the philosophical foundations of international law Those

concerned with the roots of German Romanticism are

aware of the enthusiasm with which the dialogues of

Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–90) were read by Kant, Jacobi,

Goethe, and Novalis

Prior to the founding of the Universities of Louvain

(1425) and Leiden (1575), nearly all the most distinguished

thinkers were obliged of necessity to pursue their careers

abroad—Siger of Brabant in Italy, Buridan in Paris,

Marsil-ius of Inghen in Heidelberg, Agricola in Italy, Erasmus in

Europe at large

Philosophy was for long only a propaedeutic subject in

the universities, leading on to the study of theology, law,

and medicine A Royal Decree of 1815 and an Act of

Par-liament of 1876 left it with one professor in each

univer-sity, with no assistants However, things have looked up

Faculties of philosophy, with philosophy regarded mainly

as an interdisciplinary activity, were made obligatory for

university status in 1960 The interdisciplinary policy

came to be seen as a failure, and in 1985 truer faculties of

Documentatieblad van de Werkgroep Sassen (Rotterdam, 1989– ),

journal ed M R Wielema, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus

University, Rotterdam

Geschiedenis van de wijsbegeerte in Nederland, ed H A Krop and M.

J Petry, 21 vols (Baarn, 1986–93) Contains anthologies of the

work of the thinkers mentioned above

J J Poortman, Repertorium der Nederlandse Wijsbegeerte

(Amster-dam, 1948); supplements 1958, 1968, 1983

F Sassen, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland tot het einde

der negentiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1959).

—— Wijsgerig Leven in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw

(Amster-dam, 1960)

Neumann, John von (1903–57) American mathematician born in Budapest His genius ranged from logic to atomic energy He introduced the Foundation Axiom of *set the-ory, which excludes ‘paradoxical’ sets such as those which are members of themselves Building on Alan Turing’s idea that a program is a form of data, his blueprint for the first electronic digital computers was the influential ‘von Neumann architecture’, now criticized because it does not allow parallelism The theory of *games is largely his creation With Oskar Morgenstern he laid the foundations

of econometrics He gave the first mathematically rigor-ous treatment of *quantum theory, including a proof that the theory cannot be made deterministic by assuming that there are hidden parameters In philosophy he confined himself to advertising the programme of Hilbert w.a.h

Norman Macrae, John von Neumann (Providence, RI, 1999).

Neurath, Otto (1882–1945) Born in Vienna Died in Oxford a refugee from the Nazis Member of the ‘left wing’ of the *Vienna Circle, famous for his anti-foundationalist *boat metaphor In the protocol-sentence debate with Carnap, Neurath insisted that knowledge is intersubjective and historically conditioned Neurath rejected both metaphysics and epistemology, admitting only positive knowledge about happenings in space and time He argued against all fictional idealizations, such as

*reductionism or completed science, and opposed foun-dations and fixed methods, urging instead judgement, technique, negotiation, and, finally, decision and action Marxism was for Neurath a science and science was a tool for change He headed Bavaria’s programme for full socialization in 1919, invented easily readable ‘picture statistics’, founded the Vienna Social and Economic Museum, was active in adult education, and spearheaded the Unity of Science Movement—to unite the separate sciences locally ‘at the point of action’ n.c

t.u

*foundationalism

Otto Neurath, Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed R S Cohen and

M Neurath (Dordrecht, 1973)

T Uebel (ed.), Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle (Dordrecht,

1991)

Neurath’s boat: see boat, Neurath’s.

neuroscience, the philosophical relevance of Neuro-science has philosophical relevance even if minds are dis-tinct from brains or, as it is better to say, mental properties are distinct from neural properties We would still need to look to neuroscience to determine whether mental events and properties had a causal influence upon neural events and thereby on the human body and behaviour If neuro-scientists were unable to find signs of causal influence, some form of *epiphenomenalism would appear to

be true In the eyes of many, the implausibility of epiphe-nomenalism implies that either the neuroscientists should carry on looking for signs of influence, or that it is

neuroscience, the philosophical relevance of 651

wrong to think of mental properties as distinct from

neural properties

Neuroscience may also show that we are not free if, as

seems plausible, there is a sense of freedom which is

incompatible with determinism (*Freedom and

deter-minism.) Its investigations have given some support to the

claim that there is an intimate relationship between

men-tal and neural events (*Psychoneural intimacy.) If

rela-tions between neural events, and between neural events

and behaviour, are shown by neuroscience to be governed

by deterministic laws, then we are not free in the sense of

freedom mentioned Unfortunately, it is debatable

whether neural indeterminism makes us any freer In this

respect, neuroscience may only have the capacity to

disappoint

If minds are not distinct from but identical with brains,

neuroscience will be potentially relevant to other

philo-sophical issues At first, it may look as if you will merely

discover more about things which have philosophical

cur-rency, such as beliefs, desires and their role in the

explan-ation of action, the nature of reasoning and mental

representation, and the means by which we arrive at

justi-fied beliefs and learn concepts In this anodyne light, it is

possible that the study of neuroscience is relevant to

phil-osophy, but the upshot may just be that neuroscience in a

way fills in the story for which philosophy has given us

some headlines It will tell us more about what these

things are, but not unsettle, to any great extent, the

dis-tinctions upon which philosophy has already alighted

However, certain philosophers have boldly suggested

that the influence of neuroscience is likely to be altogether

different Neuroscience will be no lackey It will be in the

driving-seat Philosophy will be seen to have appealed to

distinctions or categories that neuroscience provides us

with reasons to replace For instance, according to this

view, there may be no such things as beliefs as we have

understood them—no things which fall under concepts of

our *folk psychology Naturally, this would alter our

approach to a number of the issues identified above

and more than likely radically alter our conception of

ourselves (*Eliminativism.)

Is this likely to happen? Here is an analogy Zoology is

the relevant discipline for the study of zebras It is possible

that zoologists will come to the conclusion that there are

no zebras because we should categorize those stripy

ani-mals in a different way But it is reasonable to think that

any such changes will not radically alter our familiar

appreciation of these animals If neuroscience is the

rele-vant discipline by which we may understand minds and

their contents, one might expect, at worst, a like degree of

reform of our mental categories A philosopher who is

non-committal at the appropriate points, and who speaks

at a suitable level of abstraction, is only likely to blanch at

something different, a veritable revolution It is not clear

why we should expect one unless the analogy breaks

down, and it is not obvious that it will To think otherwise,

we would need to be told a thoroughly convincing story

of why we grossly misconceive our minds

Finally, the extent to which neuroscience makes good its initial promise to provide us with some scientific under-standing of much of what we understand by our talk of minds may have a more general philosophical relevance

It would be a further vindication of what may be loosely called ‘the scientific picture of the world’ and thereby the philosophy that underpins it Some spiritual and religious concerns may look very different as a consequence It would probably be more difficult to believe reasonably in certain doctrines such as the *immortality of the human

*mind–body problem

W Bechtel et al (eds.), Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader

(Oxford, 2001)

M R Bennett and P M S Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford, 2003).

P M Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge,

Mass., 1989)

P S Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

A Clark, Microcognition (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

T Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1989).

neustic and phrastic This pair of terms was coined by

R M Hare in 1952 to distinguish the content (phrastic) from the mood or force (neustic) of a sentence Thus com-mands and statements could agree phrastically, while dif-fering neustically Hare concludes from this analysis that the same logical principles can apply in ethical as in non-ethical language There is an inconsistency between posting a letter and burning it; and that logical point affects commands, wishes, etc which may arise in this

*prescriptivism

R M Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952).

neutral monism The theory, associated with William James and Bertrand Russell, that the world is composed

of one sort of entity, or stuff, the fundamental nature of

which is neither mental nor physical The mind consists

of these entities under one aspect, and matter consists of them under another The theory was intended to preserve the advantages of *monism, in particular ontological par-simony, while avoiding the problems of reduction present

in both pure *idealism and *materialism It never became popular both because no proper characterization of the basic neutral stuff could be given, and because it had some tendency to appear as a notational variant on idealism Something like it is occasionally revived, for example by

T Nagel in The View from Nowhere (1986). p.f.s

Mark Sainsbury, Russell (London, 1979), 261–8.

Newcomb’s paradox Paradox about prediction and

choice There are two boxes before you, A and B, and you are allowed to choose either just box A or alternatively

both boxes You may keep anything you find in any box you choose You know that a very powerful Being, with

an untarnished record of successfully predicting human behaviour, has acted in the following way: he has put

652 neuroscience, the philosophical relevance of

£1,000 in box B; and he has put £1,000,000 in box A if and

only if he predicts that you will choose just box A What

should you do?

1 You should choose just box A For the Being will

have predicted this, and so filled it with £1,000,000, so you

will be rich; whereas if you choose both boxes, he would

have predicted that, and you would only get £1,000.

2 You should choose both boxes For either the Being

has predicted this or he hasn’t If he hasn’t (but has instead

predicted you will choose just box A), you will end up with

£1,001,000 as opposed to £1,000,000 had you chosen just

A If he has, then you will at least get £1,000, as opposed to

nothing had you chosen just A Either way, you’ll be

better off choosing both boxes

The paradox consists in the incompatibility between these

apparently well-argued recommendations r.m.s

Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch 3.

New England Transcendentalism A religious,

philosoph-ical, literary, and social movement that flourished in the

1830s and 1840s and whose leaders tended to live around

Concord or Boston, Massachusetts Transcendentalism

reacted against ‘corpse-cold’ Unitarianism, which limited

itself to the ‘understanding’, the faculty employed in

prac-tical affairs and scientific theorizing As German and

British *philosophical romanticism had discovered, there

is also ‘reason’, a faculty able to range beyond sensation

and intuit spiritual and metaphysical truths Reason allows

one to dispense with religious texts and institutions,

philo-sophical argumentation, and social and ethical traditions

In Nature (1836) Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that

rea-son reveals that we are one with nature, which has a

spir-itual source beyond definitive comprehension Henry

David Thoreau in *Civil Disobedience (1849) appealed to

higher law in rejecting immoral civil laws, and in Walden

(1854) provided a sweeping critique of American society

Transcendentalists also initiated influential reforms in

education and developed model communities intended to

unify the practical with the ideal c.c

*transcendentalism

Paul F Boller Jr., American Transcendentalism 1830–1860: An

Intel-lectual Inquiry (New York, 1974).

B Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America 1720–2000 (Oxford,

2002)

new philosophy calls all in doubt.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

And element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.’

( John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World:

The First Anniversary’, lines 205–8) Donne published the ‘Anatomy’ in 1611, the year after

Galileo published the first accounts of his observations

with the telescope, and when Descartes was 15 It balances

on the brink between medievalism and the Renaissance—

regret about the Fall and original sin and assumptions that

the world is running down like a clock come together with references to Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler and debate over whether the fire round the world really exists The

‘new philosophy’ seemed to threaten disruption and chaos

Twelve years later Galileo under threat of torture dis-avowed belief in a revolving earth (muttering ‘yet it does move’), and Descartes, hearing of this, suppressed

publi-cation of his Le Monde, which also taught the Copernican

New Realism (also called neo-Realism) An American philosophical movement against Royce’s idealism, led by his former students and young colleagues at Harvard (Ralph Barton Perry, William P Montague, and E B Holt) It was a co-operative movement involving a com-mon manifesto and joint publications, and as such was a significant factor in the professionalization of American philosophy Its members had allegiances to other compat-ible intellectual movements (e.g *behaviourism and

*pragmatism), but all held a theory of direct acquaintance with physical objects They were unable to work out a common theory of *illusion, and gave way to attacks from

new riddle of induction: see grue.

New Right, political: see Right, the political New.

Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) Strongly interested in both theology and alchemy, to each of which he devoted a great deal more time and intellectual energy than he did to his more orthodox scientific pursuits, Newton none the less found time to be an outstanding mathematician and theoretical and experimental physicist He invented the

*calculus earlier than, and independently of, its first pub-lisher, Leibniz Side-stepping Aristotle’s question ‘What keeps moving things moving?’, Newton took inertial laws

as axiomatic Deducing Kepler’s empirical laws of planet-ary motion from the inverse square principle, Newton

held that gravity was not an occult force, nor an essential

quality of bodies, but, perhaps influenced by the *Stoics, tacitly accepted mechanically inexplicable forces In reli-gious terms Newton was an Arian, believing that the Church had taken a wrong turning when it opted for the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity j.j.m

R S Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton

(Cambridge, 1980)

New Zealand philosophy Academic philosophy in New Zealand belongs to the British side of the bicultural part-nership established by the Treaty of Waitangi between Maori and the Crown in 1840 Accordingly, it has developed in tandem with the prevailing Anglo-American traditions in philosophy, and in strong mutual relation-ship with *Australian philosophy New Zealand’s profes-sional philosophical association continues to count as a

‘division’ of the Australasian Association of Philosophy,

New Zealand philosophy 653

which is responsible for the editorship of the Australasian

Journal of Philosophy.

New Zealand philosophers have not been, however,

merely consumers and transmitters of Northern

philo-sophical culture They have been active contributors to

the discipline, and in many cases innovators influencing its

direction internationally Karl Popper wrote The Poverty of

Historicism (not published in book form until 1957) and the

two volumes of The Open Society and its Enemies (1945)

while holding a lectureship at Canterbury College of the

University of New Zealand from 1937 to 1945 It was there

that Popper met the neurophysiologist (and Nobel Prize

winner) John Eccles, with whom he later collaborated in

The Self and its Brain (1977) Canterbury, too, was home to

the New Zealander Arthur Prior, as lecturer from 1945,

and then as Professor from 1952 to 1959 While there,

Prior published his Formal Logic (1955) and Time and

Modality, the John Locke lectures for 1955/6, providing a

systematic presentation of modern tense logic John

Passmore’s Hume’s Intentions (1952) appeared while he

held the Chair at Otago: his successor was J L Mackie,

whose publications at that time include ‘Evil and

Omnipotence’, Mind (1955).

Since 1960 some areas of special concentration can be

discerned Prior’s influence set a focus on logic that became

the most distinctive feature of New Zealand philosophy for

three or more decades after he left for a chair at Manchester

and eventually a fellowship at Balliol (from 1966) This

focus is exemplified by the work of George Hughes and

Max Cresswell at Victoria University of Wellington (An

Introduction to Modal Logic (1968) and Cresswell’s Logics and

Languages (1973)), Pavel Tichy’s work in type theory, logic,

and the philosophy of logic at Otago (The Foundations of

Frege’s Logic (1988)), and Krister Segerberg’s development

of dynamic logic at Auckland

Work in the philosophy of the arts has been prominent

in New Zealand, with the main contributors being Greg

Currie (previously at Otago), Stephen Davies at Auckland,

and David Novitz and Denis Dutton, editor of the journal

Philosophy and Literature, at Canterbury New Zealand has

participated in an international trend towards greater

emphasis on applied ethics, with a Bioethics Centre

estab-lished at Otago in 1988, and a Diploma in Professional

Ethics at Auckland in 1992 Old divisions between

‘conti-nental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy have become less

rele-vant—consider, for example, Julian Young’s work on

Nietzsche and Heidegger at Auckland—and New

Zealan-ders are well represented in many areas of emerging

import-ance, such as the philosophy of biology (Kim Sterelny at

Victoria University of Wellington edits Biology and

Philoso-phy), the philosophy of artificial intelligence ( Jack

Copeland, of Canterbury, is director of the Turing Archive

for the History of Computing), and virtue ethics (Rosalind

Hursthouse and Christine Swanton at Auckland)

The sixty or so members of the community of academic

professional philosophers in New Zealand (as in 2003)

contribute across all main areas of philosophy, however:

note, for example, Alan Musgrave’s contributions in

epistemology and the philosophy of science since his appointment to the Otago chair in 1970 Yet the question does arise whether New Zealanders should take opportun-ities to develop distinctively regional philosophies The challenge to achieve this has been presented by the New Zealander Richard Sylvan—whose work on non-classical logics has been influential in Australasia and beyond—in his ‘Prospects for Regional Philosophies in Australasia’

(Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1985) ) An interest in

philosophical engagement with Maori culture has emerged with the work of John Patterson at Massey

(Exploring Maori Values (Dunmore Press, 1992) ), and the

prospect of philosophical work on the Maori side of the bicultural partnership is held out by the development of whare wananga (Maori universities) Issues in social and political philosophy of special reference to the New Zealand context have also received attention: see e.g

Graham Oddie and Roy Perrett (eds.), Justice, Ethics and New Zealand Society (Oxford, 1992) Perhaps the most

distinctive feature of contemporary New Zealand philoso-phy, however, is something widely remarked by visitors: the congeniality and friendliness which seem to be a func-tion both of the small size of the academic community and

of the national ethos of Aotearoa-New Zealand j.bish

Nicholas of Autrecourt (c.1300–?) A student at Paris, he

later taught there, delivering a series of lectures on the

Sentences of Peter Lombard Certain of his theological

views caused offence in the Church and under pressure from the Church he burned his writings and retracted his offensive views He is in some respects a forerunner of David Hume, placing emphasis on the principle that if two things are really different from each other then it is not possible to argue with certainty from one to the other On this basis he presents an account of *causality very similar

to the account that Hume was later to present Nicholas’s account of the relation between *substance and accident

J Weinberg, Nicholas of Autrecourt (Princeton, NJ, 1948).

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) A student at Heidelberg and Padua, he subsequently became active in Church politics, making an impact at the Council of Basle (1432), and seeing some of his ecumenical work bearing fruit some years later at the Council of Florence He became a cardinal

in 1448 Nicholas is famous for his teaching on docta ignorantia (educated ignorance), in which he focuses upon

the ineffability of *God, and the implication that those who think they have affirmative knowledge of God are truly ignorant, the knowledgeable ones being those who are aware that they are ignorant of him The unknowability

of God follows from Nicholas’s doctrine of the ‘coinci-dence of opposites’, that in God there exist as identities what are utterly distinct in us For example, the existence

of a created thing is distinct from its *essence, for it is not

of the essence of any created thing that it exists But in God his essence and existence are identical Also God is the maximum, the greatest possible being, and is also the

654 New Zealand philosophy

minimum, the least, for he does not occupy any part of

J Hopkins, A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of

Cusa (Minneapolis, 1978).

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900) German

philosopher and critic par excellence A classical philologist

by training and academic profession, Nietzsche’s

philo-sophical efforts—deriving chiefly from the last dozen

years of his short productive life—were little heeded until

long after his physical and mental collapse in 1889 (at the

age of only 44) He subsequently emerged as one of the

most controversial, unconventional, and important

fig-ures in the history of modern philosophy His influence

upon European philosophy in the twentieth century has

been profound; and he has belatedly come to receive

con-siderable attention in the English-speaking world as well,

as the shadow cast by the travesty of his appropriation by

the Nazis and Fascists has receded, along with the sway of

philosophical fashions inhospitable to his kind of thinking

and writing He gave his Beyond Good and Evil the subtitle

Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future; and in this he may well

have been prophetic

Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise grew out of his

background as a philologist schooled in the study of

clas-sical languages and literatures, his deep concern with

issues relating to the quality of life in the culture and

society of his time, his conviction that the interpretative

and evaluative underpinnings of Western civilization are

fundamentally flawed, and his determination to come to

grips with the profound crisis he believed to be impending

as this comes to be recognized He sought both to

com-prehend this situation and to help provide humanity with

a new lease on life, beyond what he called ‘the death of

God’ and ‘the advent of nihilism’ following in its wake He

deemed traditional forms of religious and philosophical

thought to be inadequate to the task, and indeed to be part

of the problem; and so he attempted to develop a radical

alternative to them that might point the way to a solution

Nietzsche had no formal philosophical training His

introduction to philosophy came through his discovery of

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation while

studying philology at the university at Leipzig This

encounter with Schopenhauer’s thought profoundly

influenced him, as can be seen in his first book The Birth of

Tragedy (1872), which he published soon after being

appointed to a professorship of philology at Basle

Univer-sity (at the astonishingly early age of 24, before he had

even been awarded his doctorate) He was convinced of

the soundness of Schopenhauer’s basic conception of the

world as a godless and irrational affair of ceaseless striving

and suffering; but he was repelled by Schopenhauer’s

starkly pessimistic verdict with respect to the worth of

existence in such a world, and sought some way of

arriv-ing at a different conclusion In The Birth of Tragedy he

made his first attempt to do so, looking to the Greeks and

their art for guidance, and to Wagner (with whom he had

become acquainted and enthralled) for contemporary

inspiration His attachment to Wagner subsequently gave way to disenchantment and then to scathing criticism

(cul-minating in his late polemic The Case of Wagner), and he

gradually emancipated himself from Schopenhauer as well; but the fundamental problem of how *nihilism might be overcome and life affirmed without illusions remained at the centre of his concern throughout his life Nietzsche’s brief academic career ended in 1879, owing

to the drastic deterioration of his health His only

signifi-cant publications after The Birth of Tragedy prior to its final

year were the four essays he subsequently gathered

together under the title Untimely Meditations, of which

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ and

‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (both 1874) are of the greatest interest Then in 1878 he published the first of a series of volumes of aphorisms and reflections under the title

Human, All Too Human It was followed during the next

few years by two supplements which became a second

volume under the same title, by Daybreak in 1881, and then by the initial four-part version of The Gay Science in

1882 In these works, which he described as ‘a series of

writings whose common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit’, Nietzsche found his way to his

kind of philosophy

It was only in 1886, however, with the publication of

Beyond Good and Evil, that he pursued it further in

some-thing like the same manner In the interval (1883–5) he published only the four parts of his great

literary-philosophical experiment Thus Spoke Zarathustra A mere

three more years remained to him prior to his collapse in January of 1889, from which he never recovered During this brief but phenomenally productive period he wrote

prefaces to new editions of most of his pre-Zarathustra writings, added a fifth part to a new edition of The Gay Science (1887), published On the Genealogy of Morals in the

same year, and then in the final year of his active life (1888)

wrote Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, The Antichrist, and his autobiographical Ecce Homo—all the

while filling many notebooks with reflections and thought experiments (The significance of this ‘Nachlass’ material

is much debated After his collapse and death, selections from it were gathered into a volume published under the

title The Will to Power.)

From his early essays to these last works, Nietzsche showed himself to be an astute, severe, and provocative critic on many fronts Cultural, social, political, artistic, religious, moral, scientific, and philosophical develop-ments and phenomena of many kinds drew his polemical attention Everywhere he looked he saw much that was lamentably ‘human, all too human’, even among those things and thinkers generally held in the highest regard This has given rise to the common impression that the basic thrust and upshot of his thought is radically negative, contributing greatly to the advent of nihilism that he announced (and of worse things as well)

This impression, however, is deeply mistaken Nietzsche actually was a profoundly positive thinker, con-cerned above all to discover a way beyond the nihilistic

Nietzsche, Friedrich 655

reaction he believed to be the inevitable consequence of

the impending collapse of traditional values and modes of

interpretation, to a new ‘affirmation’ and ‘enhancement’

of life His critical fire was only a means to this end,

pre-liminary to the twin philosophical tasks of reinterpretation

and revaluation he advocated and pursued with growing

explicitness and determination from The Gay Science

onward

As a further means to this end, and likewise preliminary

to these tasks, Nietzsche developed and undertook a

var-iety of forms of analysis, of which the kind of ‘genealogical’

inquiry exemplified by his investigations in On the

Geneal-ogy of Morals is one notable and important example His

analytical acumen was as extraordinary as his critical

astuteness; and his writings both before and after

Zarathustra contain a wealth of cultural, social,

psycho-logical, linguistic, and conceptual analyses from many

dif-ferent perspectives, upon which he drew not only in his

critiques but also in his reinterpretative and revaluative

efforts His recognition of the importance of engaging in

and drawing upon a multiplicity of such analyses in

philo-sophical inquiry is reflected in his insistence that such

inquiry is inescapably perspectival—and that this

cir-cumstance is by no means fatal to it, if one can learn to

capitalize upon the possibility of bringing a variety of

per-spectives to bear upon many of the matters with which it

may concern itself This is his practice as well as his

pre-scription, in his explorations of issues ranging from moral

and religious phenomena to aspects of our human nature

and to knowing and reasoning themselves

The form of Nietzsche’s philosophical writings both

before and after Zarathustra, which for the most part

con-sist of collections of relatively brief aphorisms and

reflec-tions on such issues rather than sustained systematic lines

of argument, is well suited to this multiply perspectival

tactic It greatly complicates the task of understanding

him; but it also makes his thinking far more subtle

and complex than is commonly supposed He returned

to problems repeatedly, in one work after another,

approaching them from many different angles; and it is

only if account is taken of his many diverse reflections on

them that anything approaching justice to his thinking

about any of them can be done Even then he can be—and

has been, and no doubt will continue to be—interpreted in

quite different ways Precisely for this reason, however,

and because he has so much of interest to say (on almost

any such interpretation) about so many things, he is

cer-tain to continue to attract, deserve, and reward

philosoph-ical attention

Nietzsche was greatly concerned with basic problems

he discerned in contemporary Western culture and

soci-ety, which he believed were becoming increasingly acute,

and for which he considered it imperative to try to find

new solutions Chief among them were questions of

meaning and value, and of our understanding of ourselves

and our place in the world, which can no longer be

answered in traditional religious and philosophical ways

He prophesied the advent of a period of nihilism, with the

death of God and the demise of metaphysics, and the dis-covery of the inability of science to yield anything like absolute knowledge; but this prospect deeply worried him He was firmly convinced of the untenability of the

*‘God-hypothesis’ and associated religious interpretations

of the world and our existence, and likewise of their meta-physical variants Having also become persuaded of the fundamentally non-rational character of the world, life, and history, Nietzsche took the basic challenge of philoso-phy to be that of overcoming both these ways of thinking and the nihilism resulting from their abandonment This led him to undertake to reinterpret ourselves and the world along lines which would be more tenable, and would also be more conducive to the flourishing and enhancement of life The ‘de-deification of nature’, the tracing of the ‘genealogy of morals’ and their critique, and the elaboration of ‘naturalistic’ accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire ‘spiritual’ nature thus came

to be among the main tasks with which he took himself and the ‘new philosophers’ he called for be confronted Unlike most philosophers of importance before him, Nietzsche was openly and profoundly hostile to most forms of *morality and religious thought He declared

‘war’ upon them, on the grounds that they not only are indefensible and untenable, but moreover feed upon and

foster weakness, life-weariness, and ressentiment,

poison-ing the wellsprpoison-ings of human vitality in the process by

‘devaluing’ all ‘naturalistic’ values He further rejected not only the God-hypothesis (as a notion utterly without war-rant, owing its acceptance only to nạvety, error, need, or ulterior motivation), but also any metaphysical postula-tion of a ‘true world of “being” ’ transcending the world of life and experience, and with them the related ‘soul-’ and

‘thing-hypotheses’, taking these notions to be ontological fictions reflecting our artificial (though convenient) con-ceptual shorthand for products and processes In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and pretations, he conceived of the world in terms of an inter-play of forces without any inherent structure or final end, ceaselessly organizing and reorganizing themselves as the fundamental disposition he called *‘will to power’ gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships among them It is debatable whether his thoughts along these lines amount to a kind of philosophical cosmology; but if

so, it is a very minimalistic one, because for him there is little more to the general character of life and the world than this, and so there is little more about it to be said, other than to give perspectival accounts of contingently obtain-ing states of affairs accessible in one way or another to us There is a good deal about our own human reality that

is accessible to us in various ways, however; and so, even if there is nothing immutable (let alone divine) about it, its comprehension is a task to which Nietzsche thought it would be well for philosophers to turn their attention, learning what they can from the human sciences, but sup-plementing what these sciences can tell us about ourselves

by way of other attainable perspectives upon human life as well So he construed our human nature and existence

656 Nietzsche, Friedrich

naturalistically, insisting upon the necessity of ‘translating

man back into nature’, in origin and fundamental

charac-ter, as one form of animal life among others ‘The soul is

only a word for something about the body,’ he has

Zarathustra say; and the body is fundamentally an

arrange-ment of natural forces and processes At the same time,

however, he insisted upon the importance of social

arrangements and interactions in the development of

human forms of awareness and activity, and moreover

upon the possibility of the emergence of exceptional

human beings capable of an independence and creativity

elevating them beyond the level of the general human rule

So Nietzsche stressed the difference between ‘higher

types’ and ‘the herd’, and through Zarathustra proclaimed

the ‘over-man’ (Übermensch) to be ‘the meaning of the

earth’, representing the overcoming of the ‘all too human’

and the attainment of the fullest possible ‘enhancement of

life’ Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by

stress-ing our animality, he sought to direct our attention and

efforts to the emergence of a ‘higher humanity’ capable of

endowing existence with a human redemption and

justifi-cation Nietzsche has long been associated with such

exist-ential philosophers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre;

but his general approach to the reinterpretation of human

reality actually differs markedly from theirs, and is better

conceived as an important naturalistic alternative and

rival to theirs, inaugurating the project of a kind of

human—scientifically, psychologically, historically, and

culturally sensitive—philosophical anthropology as one

of the tasks of his ‘philosophy of the future’

Nietzsche proposed that life and the world be

inter-preted in terms of his conception of ‘will to power’; and he

framed his ‘Dionysian value-standard’, and the

‘revalu-ation of values’ that he called for, in terms of this

interpret-ation as well The only positive and tenable value-scheme

possible, he maintained, must be based upon a

recogni-tion and affirmarecogni-tion of the world’s fundamental character,

and so must posit as a general standard the attainment of a

kind of life in which the assertive–transformative ‘will to

power’ is present in its highest intensity and quality This

in turn led him to take the ‘enhancement of life’ and

cre-ativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values

and development of a naturalistic value-theory; for he

thought that naturalistic sense can be made of both of

these ideas, and that they can also be utilized to breathe

new life into the idea of value, making possible a

construc-tive ‘revaluation’ rather than a bleakly nihilistic

devalu-ation of all received values and human possibilities

This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s

thinking with respect to morality as well Insisting that

moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation

ought to be understood and assessed ‘in the perspective of

life’, he argued that most of them are contrary rather than

conducive to the enhancement of life, reflecting the

all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of

less-favoured human groups and types Distinguishing

between ‘master’ and *‘slave’ moralities, he found the

latter increasingly to have eclipsed the former in human

history, and to have become the dominant type of moral-ity at the present time, in the form of a ‘herd-animal’ morality well suited to the requirements and vulnerabil-ities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultify-ing and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule He further suggested the possibil-ity and desirabilpossibil-ity of a ‘higher’ type of moralpossibil-ity for the exceptions, in which the content and contrast of the basic

‘slave–herd-morality’ categories of ‘good and evil’ would

be replaced by categories more akin to the ‘good and bad’ contrast characteristic of master morality, with a revised (and variable) content

Nietzsche’s naturalistic approach to normativity, how-ever, allows for the conception of differing sorts of moral-ities attuned and conducive to the flourishing and development of different forms of individual, social, insti-tutional, and cultural life, and so appropriate to them and

to whoever might participate in them to the extent that they do so, rather than for their conception as the moral-ities of distinct types of human beings So he did not advo-cate the abolition of ‘herd-animal’ morality, but rather its restriction to ‘herd-animal’ human types and human situ-ations; and so he likewise did not advocate a general human reversion to the ‘master morality’ he supposes to have prevailed among barbaric ‘beasts of prey’, but rather

a shift of some human beings in areas of their lives in which they have exceptional ability to norms better suited

to the cultivation and expression of that ability

The strongly creative flavour of Nietzsche’s notions of such a higher humanity and associated higher morality reflects his linkage of both to his conception of *art, to which he attached great importance Art, as the creative transformation of the world as we find it (and of ourselves thereby) on a small scale and in particular media, affords us

a glimpse of the possibility of a kind of life that would be lived more fully in this manner, and constitutes a step in the direction of its emergence In this way, Nietzsche’s mature thought expanded upon the idea of the basic connection between art and the justification of life which was his

gen-eral theme in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche was highly critical of traditional and com-monplace ways of thinking about truth and knowledge, maintaining that as they are usually construed there is and can be nothing of the kind (except in highly artificial con-texts), that all thinking is ‘perspectival’, and that ‘there are

no facts, only interpretations’ This has led some to sup-pose that he rejected the idea of truth and knowledge altogether, and so was a radical epistemological nihilist Yet he manifested a passionate commitment to ‘truthful-ness’, and pursued philosophical tasks which he quite clearly supposed to have something like knowledge as their aim (So, for example, this is the avowed objective of

his ‘genealogical’ investigations in On the Genealogy of Morals, as well as in many of the lines of inquiry he pursues

in The Gay Science.) He did reject various absolutist

concep-tions and criteria of truth and knowledge (or,

alterna-tively, contended that, on such conceptions and by such

criteria, there is no ‘truth’ and can be no ‘knowledge’) But

Nietzsche, Friedrich 657

he also sought to replace traditional ways of thinking

about truth and knowledge with viable alternatives that

make important sense of them, and to give a significant

array of forms of cognitive inquiry—including various

forms of natural- and human-scientific inquiry—new

post-absolutist, anti-nihilist credentials and legitimacy

Both in principle and in practice Nietzsche’s thinking

was avowedly interpretative, multiply perspectival,

experimental, and tentative, and made free use of

lan-guage that is highly metaphorical and figurative He

pre-ferred to offer suggestions, hazard guesses, and propose

hypotheses rather than attempt to construct rigorous lines

of reasoning He further acknowledged that the upshot of

what he (or anyone else) has to say on any substantive

issue neither is nor can ever be beyond all dispute Yet he

repeatedly insisted upon the distinction between the

plausibility and soundness of various ideas on the one

hand, and their ‘value for life’ on the other (between their

‘truth-value’ and their ‘life-value’, as it were) Although

some of his unguarded remarks may seem to suggest

otherwise, he inveighed explicitly against the conflation of

the two—even while also arguing that the value of all

knowledge and truthfulness ultimately must be referred

to their ‘value for life’ for human beings with differing

constitutions and conditions of preservation, flourishing,

and growth, and judged before that tribunal

Philosophy for Nietzsche involves the making of cases

for and against various proposed interpretations and

evalu-ations For the most part he did not present arguments of

the sort that one usually finds in the writings of

philoso-phers and expects of them He attempted to make his

criti-cisms stick and his own ideas stand in other ways On the

attack, he typically sought to make cases against ways of

thinking he found wanting by presenting an array of

con-siderations intended collectively first to make us

suspi-cious of them and aware of just how problematical they

are, and then to deprive them of their credibility He

gen-erally did not claim that the considerations he marshals

actually refute the targets of his criticism Rather he

typic-ally aimed to dispose of them by undermining them

suffi-ciently to lay them to rest, exposed as unworthy of being

taken seriously any longer

When advancing alternatives to them Nietzsche

pro-ceeded in a somewhat similar manner, presenting various

supporting considerations—both general and specific—

none of which by themselves may be decisive, but which

taken together are intended to be compelling They are

purported to establish his ‘right’ to the ideas he puts

for-ward, notwithstanding the novelty they may have, and

the reluctance many may feel to entertain and embrace

them And he conceived this ‘right’ as a cognitive one

Here, too, he was generally prepared to acknowledge that

the cases he makes do not actually prove his points, and

couched his hypotheses and conclusions in tentative and

provisional language He also not only admitted but

insisted that they leave open the possibility of other

inter-pretations as well as of subsequent modifications, as

fur-ther considerations are hit upon and introduced But it is

clear that he supposed it to be possible to make cases for his interpretations and evaluations, the positive upshot of which is strong and clear enough to warrant confidence that he is at least on the right track, and has got hold of something important He often did say things to the effect

that these are ‘his truths’, to which others may not easily

be entitled But this way of speaking may be understood as

a challenge to others to earn their right to lay like claim to

understand what he has grasped, rather than as an admis-sion that they are nothing more than figments of his own creative imagination

A consequence of the perspectival approach Nietzsche favoured is that one must employ models and metaphors drawn from whatever resources are available to one in conceptualizing and articulating what may be discerned from the perspectives adopted—and, indeed, that these perspectives themselves are to no little extent framed by means of such resources He himself took his models and metaphors from literature and the various arts, from the natural sciences, and also from the social and behavioural sciences, from economics to psychology He further availed himself of conceptual resources and images drawn from a multitude of other domains of discourse, including law, medicine, linguistics, and even theology In this way

he was able to take advantage of the different ways of thinking associated with and suggested by them, and to play them off against each other, thereby avoiding becom-ing locked into any one or particular cluster of them They afforded him the means of discovering and devising an expanding repertoire of perspectives upon the matters with which he was concerned, and so of developing and sharpening what he called the many and different ‘eyes’ needed to contribute to a growing and deepening com-prehension of them This has an important bearing upon the question of how his perspectivism is to be understood, and how it works in practice

Nietzsche clearly held that neither this sort of inquiry nor any other that is humanly possible will suffice to enable one to attain the sort of knowledge to which metaphys-icians have traditionally aspired It by no means follows, however, that for him there is nothing of any significance

to be comprehended He considered the forms of morality that have arisen in the course of human events to admit of better-than-ordinary comprehension if approached in this manner and spirit, for example; and he clearly supposed that the same applies to a broad range of other such phe-nomena that are to be encountered within the compass of human life, history, and experience—and indeed to our attained and varying human reality itself, down to its basic character and general conditions Rather like a latter-day Vico, he seized upon the idea that it is humanly possible to comprehend at least something of whatever has been humanly constituted He came to take this idea quite ser-iously, concluding that it has important implications for the possibility of knowledge, and that its scope is very wide indeed For what he called ‘the world that concerns us’— which includes ourselves—consists in phenomena that are

in various and very real respects ‘our doing’

658 Nietzsche, Friedrich

Nietzsche thus in effect proposed to replace the Holy

Grail of an ultimate reality conceived along the lines of a

transcendent deity or ‘true world’ of ‘being’, and the quest

for it conceived as the proper mission and picture of true

knowledge, with a different paradigm of reality and

associ-ated conception of comprehension Suppose we take as our

paradigm the sort of reality in which human life and the

world of our activities and experience consist, and conceive

of knowledge in terms of the kind of comprehension of

them of which they admit and we are capable Making them

our point of departure, we then can consider how far it is

possible to go by expanding the scope of their application

into the world with which we find ourselves confronted—

while devoting our main efforts to the exploration of those

things that are to be encountered within the realm of the

human, and to the devising of the strategies of inquiry that

will be most appropriate to their comprehension If in this

way we manage to achieve some measure of understanding

of the kind of world in which our human reality has

emerged and taken the various forms and associated

expres-sions it has, so much the better But even if we cannot do

much more than comprehend ourselves and things human,

this will at least be something—and something quite

signi-ficant and well worth achieving at that

We can, however, do something more than this—and

something that is, for Nietzsche, in the end, a good deal

more important: we can come to understand what

mean-ing and value amount to, and how it is possible to endow

life with forms of meaning and value that it may not have

in the first place, but is capable of attaining Nietzsche’s

reinterpretative efforts are not pursued for their own sake,

but rather for what they can contribute to the revaluative

part of his philosophical agenda If humanity is to outgrow

its childish need for absolutes without despairing at their

absence and winding up nihilistically willing either

noth-ing or nothnoth-ingness, we must find a new and more viable

way to the affirmation of life than those that have been

based on fictions, illusions, impossible dreams, and leaps

of faith We must rethink meaning and value, and find

ways to attune ourselves sufficiently to attainable forms of

them that this ‘disillusioned’ affirmation becomes not

only humanly possible, but humanly compelling

Niet-zsche’s kind of philosophy is not itself intended to be the

answer, meeting this need out of its very own resources

and accomplishments; for that requires more than

thought It requires life, lived in ways that creatively

enhance its quality What Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy

is intended to be here is rather like what Nietzsche’s Thus

Spoke Zarathustra is intended to be: a reflection on

mean-ing and value that can open our eyes to what they are or can

be all about, and a call to make them come true r.s

*God is dead; superman

Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge,

1990)

Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philospher (New York, 1965).

Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Oxford, 1980).

Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist,

4th edn (Princeton, NJ, 1974)

Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M Higgins (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge, 1996).

Alexander Nehmas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge,

Mass., 1985)

John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (New York, 1996).

Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, tr Shelley

Frisch (New York, 2002)

Richard Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana, Ill., 1995).

—— Nietzsche (London, 1983).

nihilism.The extreme view that there is no justification for values and, in particular, no justification for morality

It is sometimes used to mean the active rejection of and attack on such values The word was invented by the Russian novelist Turgenev to describe young rebels in Tsarist Russia Ever since, the word has been used to condemn those who refuse to accept certain preferred prevailing values Philosophically, ‘nihilism’ is often employed as an ominous alternative characterization of

*relativism and other views that deny the existence of

‘absolute’ moral standards Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, is often called a nihilist His case is instructive Nietzsche is said to be a nihilist because he questions the value of such ideals as truth and morality, but he does so because they eclipse other, more important values He thus accuses the Judaeo-Christian tradition of nihilistic tendencies by emphasizing the ‘other-worldly’ and reject-ing ‘naturalistic’ values By definition, the nihilist believes

in nothing and disdains all values But it is worth asking, along with Nietzsche, whether any such stance is possible,

F Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York, 1968).

nirvana.In *Buddhist philosophy, the blowing out of the flame of the self Hence the end of all suffering—by living without craving or by dying never to be reborn Com-monly understood as pure extinction, it is described by some Buddhist scriptures as a positive state of perpetual peace ‘Since the self, strictly speaking, does not exist

any-way, who enjoys this permanent painlessness?’ ‘Is it real—

since nothing real can be permanent?’ These remain questions to be answered by silence a.c

T Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirva¯na (Benares,

1989)

Nishida Kitaro¯(1870–1945) Foremost Japanese philoso-pher of the twentieth century and founding father of the Kyoto School, Nishida is best known for his path-breaking

work of 1911, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyu¯).

With this book he began to articulate a system of thought based on the *Zen Buddhist experience in terms borrowed from French, German, and Anglo-American philosophy, psychology, and natural science Drawing on William James and Henri Bergson, Nishida developed a philoso-phy based on ‘pure experience’ as that which underlies the subject–object relation A thinker of great erudition and learning, he developed and refined his system over several decades to encompass the social and historical worlds as

Nishida Kitaro¯ 659