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i48 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 : 1 JANUARY 1993 Neuhouser's interpretation has a certain "willful" quality. Having equated selfpositing activity and intellectual intuition, for example, he treats them as simply identical . He consistently reads Fichte's talk of the self's "activity" as a reference to "structures in consciousness," as if there were no alternative readings. He thereby tends to miss the senses in which Fichte (like Kant) attributes a kind of "formative power" to the self in its original act, and the implications of this attribution for the self's "practical" nature. Thus, in his chapter on Fichte's account of practical selfhood, Neuhouser is very interesting on the topic of how intellectual intuition renders the self "autonomous ," and causally independent, but has little to say about the self's active selfassertion . Not surprisingly, then, his discussion of the notion of "striving" is as weak as his account of intellectual intuition is strong. Altogether, Neuhouser has written a highly focused, if occasionally myopic, very informative and illuminating study, valuable even to students of Fichte who will find important fault with some of its main theses. A. J. MANDT Wichita State University Maudemarie Clark. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Modern European Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 199o. Pp. xiv + 298. Cloth, $39.5o. Paper , $12.95. Chapters x through 4 of Maudemarie Clark's important book offer a rich elaboration of some ideas first suggested schematically by John Wilcox': I will call them the Epistemological Thesis (ET) and the Developmental Thesis (DT). According to Clark's ET, the "mature" Nietzsche believed we could have knowledge of the truth because he accepted (though not in these terms): (i) the "minimal correspondence theory" of truth: "Snow is white" is true (in a language L) iff snow is white; and (ii) that truth is epistemically constrained. Thus (to simplify a bit), since "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white; and since whether snow is, in fact, white, cannot outstrip "our best standards of rational acceptability" (6o) for beliefs concerning the whiteness of snow, it is possible for us to have knowledge of the truth-value of the proposition "snow is white." According to the DT, Nietzsche's view of truth changed during his career. In the early essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873), he accepted the "metaphysical correspondence theory, the conception of truth as correspondence to the thing-in-itself" (22). BecaUse, under the influence of Schopenhauer, he thought we had no knowledge of things-in-themselves, he accepted the Falsification Thesis (FT): our merely "human" knowledge necessarily falsifies what the world is really like in itself. By the early 188os, Nietzsche came to reject the idea of the thing-in-itself as incoherent. Yet he continued to accept the FT because he continued to accept the Schopenhauerian Representational Theory of Knowledge (RTK), according to which ' Truth and Value in Nietzsche (Ann Arbor: Universityof MichiganPress, x974),esp. 123-24. BOOK REVIEWS X49 our knowledge is of "representations" of things, not things themselves. Only in his final six works, beginning with the Genea/0gy in 1887, does Nietzsche reject the RTK and come to realize that his rejection of the thing-in-itself in earlier works should lead him to the ET; this is why, Clark claims, we do not find the FT in any of these late works. In Chapters 5 and 6, Clark shows how Nietzsche's perspecdvism and his criticism of the pursuit of truth as an ascetic ideal are, in fact, compatible with his own belief in the possibility of truth. In Chapters 7 and 8, she argues that will to power and eternal recurrence are consistent with Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysics, because rather than being metaphysical doctrines, they are simply the foundations of an alternative idealto the ascetic ideal. Clark's discussion of will to power is especially provocative, and will repay careful study. Let me venture four critical comments. (l) Against commentators (from Danto to Derrida) who contend that Nietzsche did deny the existence of truth, Clark notes that this "apparent nihilism in regard to truth.., threatens the coherence of his critique of...

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