Editorial Foreword

Abstract

This special issue on Nietzsche and postanalytic philosophy arises from a conference of that title at the University of Southampton in 1999 organized by the Friedrich Nietzsche Society in conjunction with the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy. The primary purpose of this conference was to explore Nietzsche's relevance for contemporary postanalytic philosophy, a purpose that itself immediately raises not only issues of Nietzsche interpretation but also the issue of how to construe the idea of postanalytic philosophy. David Cooper's essay directly addresses the latter issue in characterizing what he terms "the analytical ambition" as the view that philosophy is to disclose the structure of thought, the rules that govern the production of intelligible speech and of which speakers are held to exhibit implicit mastery. Drawing out the salient features of this ambition, Cooper articulates a view of Nietzsche as posing a serious philosophical challenge to the cogency of this ambition in arguing that this rule model is neither a necessary presupposition of explaining our linguistic practices nor, in the end, a sustainable picture of conceptual understanding.