Abstract:This article replies to Max Minden Ribeiro's critique of the view of consciousness I attribute to Nietzsche in my 2021 monograph, Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology, and to João Constâncio's comments on that critique, in which he agrees with several of Minden Ribeiro's conclusions and raises his own questions about my reading of Nietzsche on the social character of reflective...
Abstract This chapter works out some of the key features of the notion of consciousness usually discussed by Nietzsche (most notably, in aphorism 354 of The Gay Science). Given such features (which include reflexivity, dependence on language and communication, and higher-order nature), it is argued that this notion of consciousness corresponds to reflective consciousness, i.e. the capacity for...
Abstract: Nietzsche’s famously wrote that “consciousness is a surface” (EH, Why I am so clever, 9: 97). The aim of this paper is to make sense of this quite puzzling contention—Superficiality, for short. In doing this, I shall focus on two further claims—both to be found in Gay Science 354—which I take to substantiate Nietzsche’s endorsement of Superficiality. The first claim is that...