Must Criticism Be Constructive?

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2012, given by philosopher Raymond Geuss

A New Version of Optimism for Education

The primary purpose of this paper is to outline the conceptual means by which it is possible to be optimistic about education. To provide this outline I turn to Ian Hunter and David Blacker, after a brief introduction to Nietzsche’s conceptions of optimism and pessimism, to show why certain forms of optimism in education are either intellectually unhelpful or dispositionally helpless in the face of current educational issues. The alternative form of optimism—which I argue is both intellectually and practically helpful—is drawn from a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. This reading of Nietzsche is not a simple exercise representing his views. As Nietzsche never explicitly advocated for any form of optimism—and frequently advocated against many of its manifestations—drawing what I call ‘a new version of optimism’ from his writings is no straightforward task, and certainly not without risk. As such, I have extended my readings of Nietzsche across his entire oeuvre, including his writings unintended for publication from his Nachlass. At the core of my argument is the claim that when Nietzsche was sketching out what he called ‘a new version of pessimism’ (Nietzsche in Writings from the late notebooks, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003: 173), it was actually quite close to what we might now call ‘a new version of optimism.’ This first claim precipitates a second, which is that this new version of optimism is not only especially suited to contemporary educational thought and practice but is itself a description of an educational experience and disposition

Warum Marx? Wir haben Wissenschaftler*innen drei Fragen gestellt

1. Wo taucht Marx in ihrem biografischen Horizont auf? 2. Welcher Marx, das heißt welcher Teil, welche Idee oder welcher Begriff seines Werkes ist für Sie von besonderer Bedeutung? 3. Was können die Sozialwissenschaften heute noch von Marx lernen

Nietzsche’s meta-axiology: against the skeptical readings

In this paper, I treat the question of the meta-axiological standing of Nietzsche's own values, in the service of which he criticizes morality. Does Nietzsche, I ask, regard his perfectionistic valorization of human excellence and cultural flourishing over other ideals to have genuine evaluative standing, in the sense of being correct, or at least adequate to a matter-of-fact? My goal in this paper is modest, but important: it is not to attribute to Nietzsche some sophisticated meta-axiological view, because I am doubtful that he has one. It is, however, to show that Nietzsche's texts do not necessitate the sceptical meta-axiological positions that have been attributed to him in the recent secondary literature. And it is thereby to suggest that we need not give up on the idea that Nietzsche takes the values he champions to have genuine evaluative standing – not because he has some sophisticated realist theory to this effect, but in a more philosophically unreflective way

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)

The last animal: cosmopolitanism in The Last Man

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