Academic

Leiter on Nietzche on Freedom of the Will

By Lawrence Solum

Brian Leiter (University of Chicago Law School) has posted Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action (Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Action, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Nietzsche holds that people lack freedom of the will in any sense that would be sufficient for ascriptions of moral responsibility; that the conscious experience we have of willing is actually epiphenomenal with respect to the actions that follow that experience; and that our actions largely arise through non-conscious processes (psychological and physiological) of which we are only dimly aware, and over which we exercise little or no conscious control. At the same time, Nietzsche, always a master of rhetoric, engages in a ?persuasive definition? (Stevenson 1938) of the language of ?freedom? and ?free will,? to associate the positive valence of these terms with a certain Nietzschean ideal of the person unrelated to traditional notions of free will.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 09, 2009 (boomark / email).