Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  One interpretation of certain of Nietzsche's somewhat cryptic comments is that the idea of equality -- that my life is worth as much as yours, or in a variant that no quantitative comparison can or should be made  between  my life's value and yours -- is a religious presumption at heart. It depends upon the background notion that we are all alike creatures of the same Creator and it will not long outlast the death of that idea. In that spirit, Brian Leiter has recently written a paper on the connection of ideas in Nietzsche's work. You can download it  via SSRN.  Or read a précis on his blog at typepad. Here's what may be the money quote (taken from that blog): Consider the Nietzschean Trolley Problem (apologies for anachronism): a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks towards Beethoven, before he has even written the Eroica symphony; by throwing a switch, you can divert the trolley so that it runs down five (or fifty) ordinary people, non-entities (say ...

An odd controversy has popped up in what one might imagine is the sedate world of academic philosophy publishing. In March Hypatia , a quarterly peer-reviewed journal of feminist philosophy, published an article by Prof. Rebecca Tuvel, "In Defense of Trans-Racialism." The gist of it was this: when someone changes his/her mind about racial self-identification, as seems to have been the case with Rachel Dolezal, then she is generally perceived by the public as a fraud. But when  the change of self identification is about sexual identity, as with Kaitlyn Jenner, there has been at least some movement of late toward recognition of and respect for that decision. Why the difference?  If both sorts of classification are socially constructed, that is if biology is not destiny in either case, then the search for a pertinent principled distinction is not an easy one. So far so good. Philosophy is about pressing questions. The real controversy arose after the editors of Hyp...