Alexander Nehamas

Convergence and Methodology in Science and Criticism

at no point is there any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.... Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study: the fact that it consists of words ... makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines. The libraries reflect our confusion by cataloguing criticism as one of the subdivisions of literature. Criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak.l

Will to Knowledge, Will to Ignorance and Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil

The question that opens and insistently runs through Beyond Good and Evil is, posed for us by what Nietzsche calls “the will to truth,” the drive, need, tendency and desire to know the world for what it is and not be deceived about it.1 Forced by the will to truth to ask questions endlessly, we even question this will itself. “Indeed,” Nietzsche writes, we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will—until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? (5:15, BGE 1) To put the value of the will to truth into question is still an effort to determine the truth about this matter. As such, in the paradoxical manner characteristic of Nietzsche’s later writing, the question is itself prompted by the will to truth, which, in the very process of casting suspicion upon itself, secures its own perpetuation.

Memory, Pleasure and Poetry: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy

* Edmund Keeley has kindly and generously discussed Cavafys poetry with me over the years, and made perceptive comments on this essay: I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. His book, Cavafys Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), provides an unsurpassed overall picture of Cavafys work, and what disagreements I register with it in what follows cannot obscure my heavy dependence on it. Another debt is owed and hereby acknowledged to Carolyn Anderson. Paul Bové and David Carrier discussed this paper with me and made me improve it in a number of

A Passion for Philosophy: Robert Solomon on Emotion, Reason and the Place of Philosophical Thought

Philosophy may be turning into a collection of specialists, working in small groups that share a specific interest, unable or unwilling to communicate with others who nominally belong to the same discipline. One mark of this situation is that we no longer have a canon, a set of texts everyone should have read or, more realistically, texts one would be ashamed to admit one didn’t know. This process of fragmentation is hardly complete, and neither its significance nor its value is obvious yet. For some, such splintering has been a positive development—a product not just of institutional and professional pressures but of philosophy’s reaching maturity, the stage of normal scientific investigation that characterizes several other academic disciplines. For Robert Solomon, however, it is an unmitigated disaster—unmitigated, that is, unless it is stopped before it is too late, and The Joy of Philosophy is part of Solomon’s long-standing fight against it. The central complaint of this book is that philosophy has become ‘‘thin’’ —reducing complex, messy problems to simple, regimented puzzles—and therefore irrelevant to most people’s lives. That is not a new complaint: Isocrates had already made it in the fourth century BC against Plato: