Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 477 would never guess that Nietzsche's uses of the term Obermenschare restricted almost entirely to the first parts of Thus SpokeZarathustra. Richardson further buys all too uncritically into a number of dubious interpretive cliches, such as Deleuze's "active/reactive" distinction between "types" of "will to power," and the idea that Nietzsche's "values" are "egoistic" and "selfish." He very appropriately focuses a good deal of attention on Nietzsche's thinking with respect to value. But here he goes importantly astray, turning Nietzsche's interpretations into exhortations. Nietzsche, we are told, "favors a much rougher world" (178), in which "power egoism" prevails (153)- "Nietzschean agents" are those who act "with a view to power" (183). "As a will to power," Richardson takes Nietzsche to be saying, "my best relations to others need to be aggressive" (185-86) . This sort of confusion of description with prescription and aspiration crops up elsewhere as well, e.g., in Richardson's representation of the thrust of Nietzsche's reflections on consciousness, and in his strange contention that Nietzsche himself wants to "bypass our conscious or critical faculties and work directly on our preconscious drives" (2o5). These problems are compounded by Richardson's extensive use of what Nietzsche might call the "herd person plural" voice, in which conventional values and moral sentiments are expressed with the confidence of self-evident truth, as in: "The content of Nietzsche's values disturbs us" (2oo). But all such flies in the ointment notwithstanding, Richardson's book is an important one. It represents one of the most significant attempts in recent years to make coherent and philosophically interesting interpretive sense of Nietzsche's philosophical thought as a constructive enterprise. In its final chapter ("Truth"), Richardson provides a very helpful reconstruction of Nietzsche's story of the genealogy of the "will to truth," and offers a useful account of truth as the emerging object of that developing will. He makes a strong case for the proposition that "Nietzsche preaches, and thinks he achieves, a culminating development of the will to truth in which it at last comes to a healthy independence" (252) . In doing so Richardson adds his voice persuasively to those who contend that, whatever Nietzsche may have thought initially and along the way, this involved a significant shift in his understanding both of truth and knowledge and of himself and his objectives as a thinker and philosopher. This valuable culminating chapter (which one might do well to read first rather than last) makes eminently clear both the nature and the significance of one of the most important parts of Nietzsche's legacy to the "philosophy of the future." It is worth the price of admission by itself; and we are in Richardson's debt for it. RICHARD SCHACHT Universityof lllinois at Urbana-Champaign Richard A. Watson. RepresentationalIdeas:FromPlato to PatriciaChurchland. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Pp. xiii + 172. Cloth, $99.oo. In 1966, Richard A. Watson published The Downfall of Cartesianism. In that seminal book, required reading for anyone working in early modern philosophy, Watson exam- 478 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 1997 ines some crucial ontological and epistemological problems facing the Cartesian theory of ideas. In his new book, Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland, he broadens the history to cover the entire spectrum of Western philosophical thought, from Plato to recent physicalist theories of the mind, but he is still concerned with basically the same problems: how do "ideas" represent reality, and how do such representations constitute knowledge of the world? 'Fhe title of the new book is misleading, since the focus of Watson's concern is not just representation in the realm of ideas as traditionally construed (as mental states), but representation in language and scientific theories of reality, artistic representation, mathematical representation, and (perhaps most importandy) the representation of reality by brain/neural states. His main thesis is that in all of these domains, resemblance is a necessary (but probably not sufficient) condition for representation. All "theories of ideas," he insists, require, in order to be meaningful, an ontological model to support their epistemological claims, to show how ideas provide knowledge of things; and the only...