Abstract

It is common for philosophers to express commitment to truth. It is also common for them to assume that to fulfill its truth-seeking mission philosophy needs to proceed rigorously. In turn, this is usually meant to imply that philosophical theories should be made up of (i) a core set of propositions displaying a distinctive evidential status and (ii) a larger set of propositions logically derived from the first one. Nietzsche seems to squarely reject this picture, for he not only dismisses the project of founding philosophy on a “scientificµ footing, but even questions philosophy’s commitment to truth. To make sense of this apparently paradoxical attack on philosophy’s traditional self-conception, I start to consider Nietzsche’s view of logic and natural science. I then turn to what he takes to be philosophy’s own mission. As I shall argue, Nietzsche does not claim that philosophers should give up truth altogether. Rather, and given that philosophy’s main task is value creation, his claim is that truth should not be treated as having an absolute value. What this shows, I think, is that Nietzsche does want to keep most of what we normally associate with philosophical rigor and rigorous truth-seeking. Real philosophical rigor, however, also requires that philosophers critically inquiry which evaluative commitments underlie their own practice.