Nietzsche's Dynamic Metapsychology: This Uncanny Animal (New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science)
Rex Welshon
Language: English
Pages: 245
ISBN: B01A1M4JJO
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Welshon argues for a new interpretation of Nietzsche's metapsychology and philosophy of mind. Rather than rehearsing Nietzsche's criticisms of souls and religious and philosophical uses of souls and subjects yet again, Welshon starts from the idea that Nietzsche is interested in unpacking the view that the subject is a naturalized phenomenon, both embodied and embedded in a larger natural and social environment and dynamically engaged with that larger environment. He shows that this view of the subject has significant textual support in Nietzsche's published books and unpublished notes. Of particular interest to readers are his discussion of drives as the yeoman psychological category of explanation, his discussion of Nietzsche's thoughts about consciousness, and his defense of Nietzsche's views against criticism that they (i) cannot make sense of psychological causation; (ii) are inconsistent with contemporary evolutionary theory; and (iii) are inconsistent with contemporary cognitive science.
Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life
Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassesment of Some Central Components of His Thought
to say, the organism–environment system is not a constitutively non-decomposable complex. Here, it is pertinent to note that a dynamicist physiology provides Nietzsche with the concepts he needs to argue that many, if not all, of the teleological elements found in much of then-contemporary philosophy, biology and physiology are superfluous and can therefore be jettisoned easily. Attacks on teleological thinking are scattered throughout Nietzsche’s work. His primary targets in his attacks are what
Metapsychology Nietzsche claims, it is every bit as plausible to argue that since preservation or existence are better served by accurate representations than by inaccurate ones, it is less likely that preservation or existence conditions are fictions than not and less likely that they are false than not. This contrary view, a kind of scientific realism, suggests that the best scientific theories are the most likely to help us survive precisely because they are true. Nietzsche mistakenly assumes
phenotype is bestowed upon offspring, which offspring repeat the process, thus lengthening giraffe necks over multiple generations. It is easy to ridicule Lamarckian inheritance because we now know that the inheritance mechanism by which evolution works is an organism’s genetic code and 70 Nietzsche’s Dynamic Metapsychology not its epigenetically acquired, phenotypic behavior. Still, it is helpful to remember that when Nietzsche was writing, Mendel’s discoveries about genetic inheritance
views in neuroscience of consciousness and neuroscientifically informed philosophy of mind that fly under the banner of embodied and embedded cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. On the basis of these arguments, he claims that all reflective conscious states are phenomenal. This is the topic of Section II. He also claims, more controversially, that some reflective conscious states are epiphenomenal, and he makes a plausible case for an evolutionary explanation of reflective consciousness and
not cause any other reflective thoughts, and nor do they cause any other basic conscious, subconscious, or unconscious drives. Each successive higher-order state is a dead end, both cognitively and affectively, a complete epiphenomenon. Diagramming the situation, where tn is a time, RCn is a reflective thought at tn, and BDn is a basic conscious, subconscious, or unconscious drive at tn, we have: t0 t1 RC1 t2 RC2 BD0 BD1 BD2 Figure 5.1 Strong epiphenomenalism of reflective consciousness
