Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Nineteenth-Century Biology

Christian Emden’s recent book sheds fascinating light on Nietzsche’s readings in the nineteenth-century life sciences and his relationship to Darwinism, though it is less successful in showing how particular readings influenced Nietzsche’s claims. Emden largely follows my distinction between substantive and methodological naturalism in Nietzsche, but argues—unpersuasively, I argue—that the latter must collapse into the former, and that the latter requires “uniform” scientific methods, though I explicitly deny that and no plausible form of naturalism requires it. I also discuss Emden’s treatment of the Kant-Nietzsche relationship, and raise doubts about whether what Emden sometimes calls “the problem of normativity” is really a Nietzschean problem.