Neil Sinhababu is interested in showing the significance of TSZ for today’s philosophical work in moral psychology. According to Sinhababu, this book is the only place where we can find Nietzsche’s most compelling critique of the rationalist idea that reason is independent of the passions and constitutes a person’s true self as well as the ground of his virtue. Through a close examination of two chapters from the start of TSZ, Sinhababu shows how Nietzsche defends the Humean claim (as perhaps absorbed from his reading of Schopenhauer) that the bodily passions use reason as their tool and constitute a person’s self and virtues. He also shows how Nietzsche anticipates and rebuts the recently influential counter-arguments of Christine Korsgaard and John McDowell. In Sinhababu’s analysis, Nietzsche would have rejected Korsgaard’s unified agent requirement and would have argued that the phenomenology of bodily passions is sufficient to explain McDowell’s idea of perceptual saliences.

The notion of autonomy has come to mean many different things – self-legislation, thinking for oneself, self-governance. But it was Kant who introduced the term into philosophy, and he meant by it the idea that we ourselves, as rational beings, are the authors of the principles by which we think and act. This chapter argues that such an idea is incoherent. Reason is essentially a receptive faculty, consisting in our capacity for responding to reasons. This chapter also explores why Kant, and many others after him, were led to this idea, namely their adherence to a naturalistic conception of the world of experience. It therefore goes on to sketch a better metaphysical conception of reality

This chapter gives a critical exploration of the various ways that PSID might be included within the reach of contractual justice as passive citizens – that is, as citizens who nevertheless lack the requisite abilities to enter into contractualist processes. First, I consider contractualist attempts, such as that of Christine Korsgaard, that try to reconcile this ‘passive citizenship’ with robust moral status. I then consider Rawlsian attempts at defending passive citizenship, such as Adam Cureton’s and Cynthia Stark’s proposals. I detect a number of issues with these contractualist strategies. For instance, some of them may rely on non-Rawlsian or noncontractualist values; they may render PSID’s moral status too vulnerable to the whims of contractors; or they may be too indeterminate to solve important social dilemmas.