PHL217H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Friedrich Nietzsche, Pathos, Jousting
Document Summary
Nietzsche was not the first thinker to try and account for the emergence of our morality in historical terms. He opens his investigation into the origin of good" and bad" by first criticizing the work of the english psychologists". The english psychologists tied to explain the origins of good" and bad" by making recourse to. The theory of the english psychologists is that: The recipients of unegoistic acts called those acts good" because they were useful. People eventually forgot that they valued unegoistic acts because they were useful. Nietzsche is unimpressed by the theory put forth by the english psychologists for two main reasons: the account is essentially unhistorical, the account is psychologically contradictory". First, the theory locates the origin of the phenomenon to be explained ( the good") in a set of mental capacities (memory, forgetfulness) that are themselves in need of a historical or developmental explanation.
