Paul Katsafanas ~ Publications

Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization

European Journal of Philosophy 13 (April 2005): 1-31.

Available here.

I show that Nietzsche’s puzzling and seemingly inconsistent claims about consciousness constitute a coherent and philosophically fruitful theory. Drawing on some ideas from Schopenhauer and F.A. Lange, Nietzsche argues that conscious mental states are mental states with conceptually articulated content, whereas unconscious mental states are mental states with non-conceptually articulated content. Nietzsche’s views on concepts imply that conceptually articulated mental states will be superficial and in some cases distorting analogues of non-conceptually articulated mental states. Thus, the claim that conscious states have a conceptual articulation renders comprehensible Nietzsche’s claim that consciousness is “superficial” and “falsifying.”

A section of this essay criticizes Brian Leiter’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s views on consciousness. Leiter accepts and responds to my criticisms in his article, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” which is available here.

Nietzsche on Agency and Self-Ignorance

Forthcoming in International Studies in Philosophy (Conference Proceedings of the North American Nietzsche Society)

A recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s work is the idea that agents are in some sense ignorant of their own actions. In this conference paper, I ask two questions: what exactly does Nietzsche mean by this claim, and how would the truth of this claim affect philosophical models of agency? I argue that Nietzsche’s claim about self-ignorance is intended to draw attention to the fact that there are influences upon reflective episodes of choice that have three features. First, these influences are pervasive, occurring in every episode of choice. Second, these influences are normatively significant, in that their presence typically affects the outcome of deliberation. Third, these influences are difficult to detect, in that one needs to acquire a great deal of self-knowledge in order to begin to counteract their effects. I briefly sketch the way in which these claims follow from Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology.

Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology

Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche, edited by John Richardson and Ken Gemes

Freud claimed that the concept of drive is “at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research.” It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud’s claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche’s accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an account of drives. I argue that Nietzschean drives are dispositions that generate evaluative orientations, in part by affecting perceptual saliences. In addition, I show that drive psychology has important implications for contemporary accounts of reflective agency. Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche’s drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent’s action by influencing the course of the agent’s reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting. I show how this point complicates traditional models of the role of reflection in agency.

Book Reviews:

Review of Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2007). Forthcoming in Mind.

Work in Progress:

In a series of papers in progress, I explore the possibility of grounding ethics in action theory. I develop a method for deriving normative claims about reasons for action from descriptive claims about the nature of action. The strategy that I pursue is a version of constitutivism, which is the view that every instance of action shares a common, higher-order aim. The presence of this aim gives rise to a standard of success for action, from which normative conclusions can be derived.

Drafts of the following two papers are available upon request.

Can Constitutivism about Practical Reason Succeed?

Recently, a number of philosophers have attempted to show that action has a constitutive aim. These philosophers hope to show that if action has a constitutive aim, then we will be able to derive an account of practical reason from an account of action. This paper argues that the constitutive aim strategy faces a hitherto unrecognized difficulty: in its current versions, it is unable to generate claims about what there is more or most reason to do.

From Philosophical Psychology to Ethics

This paper develops and defends a new version of constitutivism, a version that is immune to the difficulty discussed in the preceding paper. It argues that facts about the structure of human motivation indicate that human action has a constitutive aim. This aim can be used to derive normative conclusions about what there is reason to do.

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