Abstract:
This article has a very specific purpose: to highlight the problems of Brian Leiter's uncritical treatment of psychology in his recent Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (2019). The author includes, without engaging in any methodological discussion, psychology in the list of what he calls "successful sciences" (i) as certifiers of Nietzschean m-naturalism; ii) as endowed with primacy over philosophy itself in determining what is meaningful "philosophical reasoning"; iii) as providing a broad and uncontested body of evidence that Nietzsche's moral psychology “is right” in profoundly complex theses. My expository strategy is to map, initially, the path taken by Leiter in the conceptual construction of his m-naturalism, and, later, to show that there is nothing in contemporary empirical psychology that legitimizes Leiter’s characterization.
Keywords:
Leiter; Nietzsche; Naturalism; Science; Psychology