Nietzsche’s Ethics: Tom Stern and Paul Katsafanas

Nietzsche is well known both for his blistering attack on contemporary values and for the difficulty of pinning him down to any particular view. Just when you think you know what he is saying, he starts saying something else. But did he have an ethical theory of his own? If so, what does it have to offer us now? Join two Nietzsche scholars in a conversation about his ethics and related themes, including his thoughts on psychology, nature and religion. Up for discussion, too, will be the question of what we, as modern readers and modern philosophers, are looking for when we read and interpret a thinker like Nietzsche, who wrote so long ago and in such an unusual way.

Tom Stern is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at University College London. He works on nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. His book Nietzsche’s Ethics was published last year. sterntom.com

Paul Katsafanas is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He works on topics at the interface of ethics and philosophy of mind, including the nature of self-consciousness; the nature of agency; the notion of drive; and the concepts of free agency and unified agency. His books include The Nietzschean Self and the edited collection The Nietzschean Mind.