Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy

Research Project Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

University of Southampton, UK 2007–2010

Upcoming events

The overall aim of this three-year project is to bring together researchers in two fields:Nietzsche scholarship and contemporary ethics. There are two broad goals:

1) to assess the challenge that Nietzsche’s critique poses to modern moral philosophy; and

2) to assess the resources available to modern moral philosophy for responding to that challenge.

The project’s primary method will be two-day workshops (three per year for three years) and annual two-day conferences. The workshops will be invitation-only events, normally with all papers circulated in advance: experience suggests that the resulting ‘hot-house’ atmosphere is intellectually the most productive in these contexts. One session per workshop will be open, however, in the form of a public lecture, to allow wider participation. The conferences, by contrast, will be uniformly open in terms of attendance, although the speakers will, again, be invited. In both cases, the invited speakers will comprise a mix of Nietzsche scholars and moral philosophers.

Our stated objectives are: (i) to situate Nietzsche’s naturalistic critique of traditional moral philosophy in the context of contemporary understandings of naturalism in morality; (ii) to understand how that critique bears, specifically, on neo-Kantian conceptions of autonomy and on neo-Aristotelian conceptions of the virtues; and (iii) to assess, in light of i and ii, the contemporary prospects for a re-evaluation of values.

Prospective topics for future events are, e.g, evolutionary accounts of morality; moral psychology; psychological egoism; the status of moral properties; consequentialism; morality after God; virtue and character; eudaimonia; perfectionism; legislating for all, legislating for oneself; the sources of normativity; autonomy and agency; value and authority; will to power; varieties of genealogy; morality and aestheticism; moral nihilism; Nietzsche’s bark, Nietzsche’s bite.

The principal investigator on this project is Professor Christopher Janaway (University of Southampton) cjanaway@soton.ac.uk