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Books by Patrick Hassan

Cambridge University Press, 2023

On what grounds could life be made worth living, given its abundant suffering? Friedrich Nietzsch... more On what grounds could life be made worth living, given its abundant suffering? Friedrich Nietzsche was among many who attempted to answer this question. While always seeking to resist pessimism, Nietzsche’s strategy for doing so, and the extent to which he was willing to concede conceptual grounds to pessimists, shifted dramat- ically over time. His reading of pessimists such as Eduard von Hartmann, Olga Plumacher, and Julius Bahnsen – as well as their critics, such as Eugen Duhring and James Sully – has been under- explored in the secondary literature, isolating him from his intellectual context. Patrick Hassan’s book seeks to correct this. After closely mapping Nietzsche’s philosophical development on to the relevant axiological and epistemological issues, it disentangles his various critiques of pessimism, elucidating how familiar Nietzschean themes (e.g., eternal recurrence, aesthetic justification, will to power, and his critique of Christianity) can and should be assessed against this philosophical backdrop.

Routledge, 2021

Despite anticipating and engaging with many of the arguments now recognisable in Anglophone moral... more Despite anticipating and engaging with many of the arguments now recognisable in Anglophone moral philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer has often been overlooked as a potential contributor to contemporary discourse within this domain. Not only was he one of the most important 19th-century critics of Kantian deontology, Schopenhauer also developed a plausible moral system of his own grounded in compassion. While interesting parallels can be drawn between his system and the sentimentalist tradition familiar from the likes of Hume and Hutcheson, Schopenhauer’s idiosyncratic metaphysics provide a unique approach to standard questions in moral psychology, the philosophy of action, axiology, and moral epistemology. The chapters in this book draw out the relevance and influence of Schopenhauer’s ethical program, attempting to demonstrate the as yet untapped wealth of conceptual resources for pressing moral problems. They address a wide range of topics, including: the moral status of animals; the moral permissibility of suicide; the possibility of altruistic action; the nature of virtue and asceticism; how Schopenhauer integrated Western influences with various Indian traditions of moral thinking, and more.

Papers by Patrick Hassan

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2023

One of the greatest philosophical disputes in Germany in the latter half of the 19th century conc... more One of the greatest philosophical disputes in Germany in the latter half of the 19th century concerned the value of life. Following Arthur Schopenhauer, numerous philosophers sought to defend the provocative view that life is not worth living. A persistent objection to pessimism is that it is not really a philosophical theory at all, but rather a psychological state; a mood or disposition which is the product of socio-economic circumstance. A developed and influential version of this view was advanced in the 1870’s by the English psychologist James Sully. Yet, as important as Sully’s critique was for the pessimism dispute, it has been almost entirely overlooked in the history of philosophy. With some growing recent attention to 19th century pessimism, this paper aims to reconstruct Sully’s view, and what I argue is his primary argument for it in terms of the best explanation for an alleged historical correlation between pessimistic belief and social hardship in the form of frustrated ideals. The paper then presents and analyses some challenges to this argument, some of which are argued to have been at least partially anticipated in the 19th century by the likes of Schopenhauer and Olga Plümacher.

Michael Cholbi & Paolo Stellino (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide, Oxford University Press, 2024

This chapter explores some of the major developments in the philosophical understanding of suicid... more This chapter explores some of the major developments in the philosophical understanding of suicide in 19th Century Western thought. Two developments in particular are considered. The first is a widespread shift towards thinking about suicide in medical terms rather than moral terms. Deploying methods initiated by a number of French and German thinkers in the preceding century who worked at the then emerging interface between the social and biological sciences, a number of 19th century thinkers ejected what they took to be old metaphysical superstitions about ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and replaced them with (allegedly) hard-nosed scientific diagnoses of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’. Dismissing traditional moral arguments against the permissibility of suicide, the phenomenon came to be viewed as a symptom of decline or degeneration. How variations of this view, in biological and social contexts, reorientated practical responses to suicide in terms of treatment rather than moral condemnation is explored. The second 19th century development in philosophical thought with respect to suicide the chapter considers concerns its place in one of the most significant controversies in Germany from 1860 to the turn of the century: the Pessimismusstreit or ‘pessimism dispute’. While philosophical pessimism might be thought to vindicate or even entail suicide, many of the most prominent pessimists—including Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann—denied that this was the case, and perhaps surprisingly took suicide to involve a special kind of moral and/or epistemic failing. The chapter aims to elucidate the different arguments which pessimists appealed to in order to ground this position.

David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian Mind, Routledge, 2023

History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2022

in 'Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy', Patrick Hassan (ed.), Routledge, 2021

Ethics & the Environment, 2021

Volume 26, Issue 2

Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2021

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2017

Nietzsche frequently describes the individuals he takes to be paradigms of human greatness as bei... more Nietzsche frequently describes the individuals he takes to be paradigms of human greatness as being rare; as exceptions to the great majority. This association appears as early as Schopenhauer as Educator in 1874, and continues well into the mature works of the 1880's, where we see an amplified opposition between what is 'noble' and 'exceptional' on the one hand, and what is pejoratively 'common' and 'mediocre' on the other. However, there is an ambiguity to this claim concerning the rarity of great individuals which has not yet been explicitly addressed. It is unclear whether Nietzsche values these exceptional individuals (at least partly) in virtue of their rarity, or whether rarity is merely a consequence or indicator of the presence of other valuable features. In other words, is rarity or distinctiveness constitutive of greatness, or is it merely the properties which make one rare which count? By drawing upon contemporary debates in the theory of value, in this paper I explore the evidence for interpreting Nietzsche to defend the view that rarity—at least under certain qualified conditions—matters for its own sake. I argue that this evidence is compelling, and that many intuitive objections to the view can be deflected by challenging the axiological assumptions which motivate them. The question concerning the value of rarity has significant evaluative implications concerning Nietzsche's famed critique of morality, and in particular the component of equality. While Nietzsche is traditionally interpreted to reject equality in virtue of its 'levelling down' effects upon certain perfectionist values, I claim that if rarity is itself valuable then we are left with a second critique of equality: that it undercuts the value of peculiarity. I explore the extent and significance of this objection in the final section of the paper.

Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Journal of Value Inquiry, Sep 26, 2016

In this paper, I take it to be uncontroversial that increasingly into his philosophical career, N... more In this paper, I take it to be uncontroversial that increasingly into his philosophical career, Nietzsche believed human greatness to be an appropriately valuable goal, at least for certain types of people. But while Nietzsche's repeated paradigms of greatness include figures as seemingly diverse as Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cesare Borgia, Julius Caesar, it is unclear precisely what great-making property (or properties) Nietzsche considers these figures to share. I consider two possible approaches which have shaped the terrain of the secondary literature on this controversial matter: greatness as a matter of internal properties (character traits); or external properties (achievements). I discuss the arguments for each view here, resulting with my own view being that both achievements and traits of character are at least necessary for what Nietzsche understands greatness to consist in. I then consider a distinction between actual and potential greatness in order to explore further necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions of Nietzsche's positive ideal. While my aim in this paper is primarily exegetical, I hope to draw upon contemporary issues in value theory surrounding the nature of achievement which are of interest to ethicists more broadly.

Reviews by Patrick Hassan

European Journal of Philosophy, 2019

Social Theory and Practice 41 (4), Oct 1, 2015