Brian Leiter on Moral Psychology with Nietzsche

Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, spoke about his new book, ‘Moral Psychology with Nietzsche’ (OUP 2019), at Trinity College Dublin on 9 December.

We were also delighted to welcome Professors Brian O'Connor (Head of School, UCD Philosophy) and Alexander Prescott-Couch (Associate Professor, Oxford Philosophy) to the discussion.

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago Law School. Brian Leiter joined Chicago Law School in 2008, after thirteen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was (at the time) the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and University College London.

His teaching and research interests are in moral, political, and legal philosophy, in both the Anglophone and Continental European traditions, and the law of evidence. His books include Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002; 2nd ed., 2015), Naturalizing Jurisprudence (Oxford, 2007), Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013), and Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (Oxford, 2019). Recent papers include “The Death of God and the Death of Morality” (The Monist, 2019) and “Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law” (The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism, 2021). He is presently working on two books: one exploring realism in political and legal theory, From a Realist Point of View, for Oxford University Press, and a co-authored one on Marx, for Routledge.

About ‘Moral Psychology with Nietzsche’ (OUP 2019):

Brian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. Leiter presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his skepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology.

Видео Brian Leiter on Moral Psychology with Nietzsche канала Dr Donna Lyons Trinity Law