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In this final chapter, Alfano describes several promising future research programs. Within Nietzsche studies, it is exciting to envision further digital humanities projects that document, analyze, and semantically map his views about philosophical topics beyond the topic of the current book. Alfano argues that it would be worthwhile to investigate Nietzsche's philosophy of mind and language, his metaphysics, his aesthetics, and various other areas using the tools developed in this book. In addition, Alfano contends that the same methods used here to interpret Nietzsche could – with relatively little retooling – be applied to a wide range of other historical philosophers. If this is right, then significant progres in the history of philosophy is a serious short-term prospect.
In this chapter, Alfano explains and showcases the results of the digital humanities methodology that informs the book. Using the Nietzsche Source, Alfano labels every passage in Nietzsche's published and authorized manuscripts for the presence or absence of several dozen moral psychological concepts, such as drive, instinct, virtue, value, life, health, integrity, and a range of discrete virtues and emotions. He then uses this dataset to conduct statistical analyses of the prevalence and co-occurence of concepts, as well as semantic network visualization to summarize his findings. The chapter is partly argumentative and partly didactic, insofar as Alfano aims to convince his readers of the usefulness of his approach and show them how they could employ it in their own research.
In this chapter, Alfano argues that the Nietzschean virtues discussed earlier in the book (curiosity, intellectual courage, pathos of distance, sense of humor, solitude) cleave together. In particular, many instances of expressing one of them will also count as expressions of at least one other. This means that there is a modest, person-type-relative unity to the Nietzschean virtues. Alfano explores this unity via the notions of conscience and ingtegrity in Nietzsche's writings. To possess integrity or be integrated, on this view, is to enjoy harmony among one's drives. Such harmony is largely a matter of luck, but it can be steered toward agency, so Nietzsche considers integration an achievement. It's what happens when someone becomes who they are. Alfano shows that if we distinguish conscience simpliciter from good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience, it becomes possible to make sense of Nietzsche's thoughts about conscience and its relation to the virtues.
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