Douglas Burnham: Is Nietzsche an historicist? And, anyway, what IS historicism?
Douglas Burnham er professor ved Staffordshire University, og har skrevet bøker om Kant og om Nietzsche. Den siste av disse, "The Nietzsche Dictionary" (Bloomsbury) kom tidligere i år. Han har også skrevet flere artikler, og boka "The Aesthetics of Wine" sammen med vår egen Ole Martin Skilleås.
Hovedinnhold
"Abstract"
Early this year, I was approached out of the blue to write a contribution for Perspectives on Political Science. This was to be a special issue of the Journal, to include a series of comments on Arthur Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines" (2014), which is an attempt to back up with considerable scholarship Leo Strauss' notion of 'esoteric writing'. This latter idea, together with Strauss' thinking about historicism, nihilism and relativism of which it is a part, has had an enormous but at times ambiguous influence on modern conservative thought, especially in the United States. Strauss saw himself as, broadly speaking, a Nietzschean. So, I was invited to give a Nietzsche-esque comment on Melzer's updating of the project. The result was a short paper "Philosophy Between the Minds", published in the June edition of Perspectives. My argument is that Strauss and Melzer both read Nietzsche too narrowly, and thus create a false distinction between historicism and freedom.