Abstract
Nietzsche is one of the great nay-sayers concerning ontology. He denies the existence of the following: abstract objects such as universals (he favours a strong nominalism); souls, spirits and personal self-identity; Kantian things-in-themselves and any kind of noumenal or other-worldly realm (he lampoons the idea of other-worldly realms advocated from Plato and Christianity to Kant);1 substances, self-identical objects and atoms (understood as ultimate indivisible continuants); anything in the world that our truths could represent. Since he often says that there are no truths, it is a contentious matter to say what Nietzsche’s views on truth are; however he maintains that no belief can represent any feature of the world and that the world has no items that could serve as truth-makers for our beliefs. So, what does exist?
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Notes
See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,“How the `Real World’ at Last Became a Myth.”
This is a quite minimal account of Nietzsche’s ontology (not unlike that attributed to Boscovich in BGE § 12) that omits many other aspects of his metaphysics, including a metaphysical version of eternal recurrence (WP §1062–3) and the doctrine of perspectivism. The first of these is an independent adjunct that can easily be dropped; but the second may well render his metaphysical system incoherent. The latter matter is raised and well discussed in chapter 6 §2 of Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1995 ).
See Peter Simons, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford, Clarendon, 1987), especially index under “essentialism, mereological”; see also D. Wiggins Sameness and Substance (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1980) chapters 4 and 6.
Cf. BGE 11 and WP 511–2.
See F. Weinert (ed), Laws of Nature: Essays on the Philosophical, Scientific and Historical Dimensions (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995) which contains a number of papers on what are laws of nature. The paper by Giere argues for a conception of physical sciences without laws, and the papers by Ruby and Steinle discuss the history and sociology of the concept laws of nature, including the thesis of their anthropomorphic origin.
See Chapter 16, section 2, “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Just So Stories” in Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Penguin, 1996) for an account of Nietzsche’s view of the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin and especially his remark that “Nietzsche’s idea of a will to power [in biology and evolution] is one of the stranger incarnations of sky hook hunger.” p. 466.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Nola, R. (1999). Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Science and Belief. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 204. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_7
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