My Christmas present from the Journal of Nietzsche Studies was a nice remark about “Zarathustra’s Moral Psychology.”

Patrick Hassan's review notes “the philosophical, literary, and historical labor” needed for understanding Zarathustra. As an undergraduate, I did that labor and found the Humean theory of motivation and powerful responses to its contemporary opponents. “On the Despisers of the Body” as anticipates Korsgaard; “On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions” anticipates McDowell. Here’s Hassan on the volume as a whole:

Many essays skillfully draw out the issues of contemporary interest and demonstrate Nietzsche’s relevance to ongoing fundamental philosophical debates. The editors are to be commended for their careful selection of quality essays in this respect.

For example, Neil Sinhababu convincingly argues that Z provides the most compelling critique in Nietzsche’s corpus of various rationalist theses; for instance, that reason is central to explaining moral motivation, moral knowledge, moral agency, and moral subjecthood. As Sinhababu presents Nietzsche’s brand of sentimentalism — a tradition more frequently addressed in the Anglophone world by way of figures such as Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith — it has the conceptual resources, moreover, to resist contemporary rationalist objections as they arise in the work of those such as Christine Korsgaard and John McDowell.

The volume is Loeb and Ansell-Pearson’s Cambridge Critical Guide to Zarathustra.