Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

Business impacts the world we live in by affecting our environment, living creatures, and our heritage. Often these costs are externalized onto remote populations or future generations. This chapter begins with an emblematic case about rare earth minerals that are vital to modern technology but which, despite “green” initiatives, are also difficult to refine or recycle, and therefore create pollution. The term “sustainability” is closely analyzed, as it conflates the senses of “maintaining our current production and consumption levels” with “maintaining resources in the face of rising prosperity and consequent depletion,” each with widely divergent implications. Arguments promoting intrinsic value of the biosphere are assessed, as are conservation claims about the broad “web of being” and potential climate change. Monetization, the technique that asks hypothetical questions to assess environmental preferences, is presented and critiqued. Triple bottom line accounting is outlined, and the amount of waste we produce is also discussed. The final case looks at the potential effects of large-scale industrial farming and its implications for the environment and the global food chain.

Kant’s moral argument for faith in God aims not at converting unbelievers but at offering those who believe a reason for principled assent to the existence of God on moral grounds. It is based on a rational connection between purposive action and assent that applies not only to religious belief but to many other purposes as well, such as what Royce called “loyalty to a lost cause.” The argument in the Critique of Pure Reason differs significantly from its presentation in later works. Kantian moral faith is in tension with Cliffordian evidentialism but not inconsistent with it, and the two together constitute the doxastic virtue lying between the twin vices of uncritical credulity and stubborn incredulity; together they enable us to avoid the complacencies of both despairing resignation and overconfidence.

In this chapter, I review the pre-twentieth-century philosophical origins of thinking about intelligence. I review work going back to Homer, and extending through Plato and Aristotle up to the work of John Stuart Mill. Many contemporary ideas about intelligence can be found to have their origins in early philosophical thinking. I also emphasize Mill’s point that intelligence, taken by itself, is not sufficient to guarantee a positive future for humankind.