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10 - On the Question of Dialectics in Nietzsche’s Epistemology

from III - Power and Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2021

Otfried Höffe
Affiliation:
University of Tuebingen
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Summary

Epistemological considerations in Nietzsche’s philosophy are rare and have always been treated as marginal. For Nietzsche himself, despite the impression one may have from the secondary literature, they were never peripheral. They pervade all of his writings and not just those which one usually describes as products of a “positivistic” period. One can hardly overestimate their importance: they employ positivistic means to go beyond a crassly antispeculative positivism that was the dominant theory in nineteenth-century philosophy and natural science. Insofar as one took his philosophy seriously in epistemological terms, it was characterized by catchwords such as “biologism,” “vitalism,” “pragmatism,” even “agnosticism.”1 Without wanting to deny the genuine aspects contained in such designations, the question can be raised whether they express his main intentions: indeed, whether as such they are even compatible with his metaphysics of the will to power and of his doctrine of the eternal return of the same. Are they not necessarily thereby relativized, mere moments that appear isolated in a metaphysical context?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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