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Nature and the Moral Evolution of Humanity in Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals"

The dissertation begins by discussing recent critical treatments of Nietzsche in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas, then gives a brief discussion of the broader scholarly reception of Nietzsche’s political thought. The body of the dissertation proceeds through the text of the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, trying to explicate his account of the origin of political society. The dissertation attempts in the first place to show that the historical narrative Nietzsche offers in the Second Essay is coherent, then to illuminate the details of his account of the rise of political society, and thus of civilized morality (what Nietzsche calls “the bad conscience”), and finally to detail the different stages in the development of the bad conscience. The dissertation lays particular emphasis on determining the relation between what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and the bad conscience. The dissertation also attempts to shed light on Nietzsche’s view of the relation between nature and political society and morality, as he expresses it both in his analysis of the bad conscience and in the somewhat more thematic discussion of this question at the beginning of the Essay.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/24322
Date13 April 2010
CreatorsMetzger, Jeffrey
ContributorsOrwin, Clifford
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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