Book Description

Abstract: The purpose of the dissertation is threefold. The first aim is to show that Nietzsche is a naturalist who believes that there are objective facts, rather than a post-modernist who denies such facts. Although Nietzsche rejects intrinsic facts about things-in-themselves, he nevertheless holds that it is objectively true that all facts are relational and that these admit of objective truth or falsity. The second aim is to show that Nietzsche's naturalist and empiricist commitments go hand in hand with his revival of three related doctrines that are critically examined in Plato's Theaetetus and Aristotle's Metaphysics IV. The first of these is equivalent to the point mentioned above. It is the Heraclitean doctrine of the unity of opposites, the view, often thought to violate the principle of non-contradiction, that everything exists and is what it is only in relation to something else. The second doctrine is Heraclitean becoming, the claim that change is an essential feature of nature, and the third is a Protagorean perspectivism, where objects of knowledge are said to be interpretive constructs that exist only in relation to an equally relative perceiving subject. In developing these points, this dissertation argues that Nietzsche's Protagorean perspectivism does not undermine the objective truth of his Heraclitean commitments, but rather that his Heraclitean commitments form the ontological backdrop for his perspectivism. The third aim is to show that Nietzsche expresses his commitment to the aforementioned Heraclitean doctrines at the beginning of both Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil and that these two doctrines shape the contents of the aphorisms that follow. This dissertation argues for this textual point not only to support the claim that these doctrines function as cornerstones to Nietzsche's philosophical project, but also to reject the view that Nietzsche's published works lack order and coherence. In defending the latter point, this dissertation makes several suggestions as to how the placement of these doctrines at the beginning of the aforementioned works might be related to Nietzsche's activity as a tragic and comic poet in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Ecce Homo.