The Surface and the Abyss: Nietzsche as Philosopher of Mind and Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Peter Bornedal

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 624
• Series: Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung; 57
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Peter Bornedal provides an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole in the context of 19th century philosophy of mind and cognition. The study explains Nietzsche’s notion of truth; his epistemology; his notions of the split and fragmented subject, of master, slave, and priest; furthermore, it offers a new interpretation of the enigmatic “eternal recurrence”. It also suggests how important aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking can be read as a sophisticated critique of ideology.

From studies in Nietzsche’s work as a whole, not least in his so-called Nachgelassene Fragmente, the book reconstructs aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking that have largely been under-described in especially the Anglo-Saxon Nietzsche-reception. The study makes the case that Nietzsche in his epistemology, his psychology, and his cognitive theory is responding to several scientific discoveries occuring during the 19th century. Read within the context of contemporary cognitive-psychological-evolutionary debates, Nietzsche’s philosophy is seen as far more scientistic, and far less poetical-metaphysical, than it has in recent reception-history been received.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Table of Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. The Narcissism of Human Knowledge. An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Über Wahrheit und Lüge in the Context of 19th Century Kantianism.
CHAPTER 2. A Silent World. Nietzsche’s Radical Realism: World, Sensation, Language
CHAPTER 3. Splitting the Subject. Nietzsche’s Radical Rethinking of the Cartesian and Kantian ‘I Think’
[CHAPTER 3.] Part I: Thinking the ‘I’ in Descartes, Kant, and Benveniste
[CHAPTER 3.] Part II: Nietzsche’s Theories of the Split Subject
CHAPTER 4. Theory of Knowledge as ‘Neuro-Epistemology’. Toward a Biological-Linguistic Subject in Nietzsche and Contemporaries
[CHAPTER 4.] Part I: Nietzsche’s Contemporaries on Sensation, Cognition, and Language
[CHAPTER 4.] Part II: Toward a ‘Biological-Linguistic’ Nietzschean subject
[CHAPTER 4.] Part III: Reconciling Positions and Drawing up Implications
CHAPTER 5. The Meaning of Master, Slave, and Priest: From Mental Configurations to Social Typologies
[CHAPTER 5.] Part I: The Incredible Profundity of the Truly Superficia
[CHAPTER 5.] Part II: On the Ideological Formatting of the Servile Configuration
CHAPTER 6. Eternal Recurrence in Inner-Mental Life. Eternal-Recurrence as Describing the Conditions for Knowledge and Pleasure
APPENDIX 1. Nietzsche and Ernst Mach on the Analysis of Sensations
APPENDIX 2. A Theory of “Happiness”?
APPENDIX 3. The Fragmented Nietzschean Subject and Literary Criticism
Backmatter