1 “The Moral Earth, Too, Is Round”: James and Nietzsche on the Aim of Philosophy Rachel Cristy, King’s College London 1. Philosophy as Individual Psychology William James and Friedrich Nietzsche share a dubious distinction: they both (in)famously explain philosophers’ views by means of their temperaments and associated needs and preferences. James’s division of philosophers into “tough-minded” empiricists and “tender-minded” rationalists in the first lecture of Pragmatism is one of the most widely remembered passages. Nietzsche constantly asks of past philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer) and contemporary “philosophers” (Strauss, Wagner, Dühring, Spencer) what their conclusions indicate about their psychological and even physiological constitutions. 1 James and Nietzsche explain this interpretive approach in remarkably similar terms. Here is James in Lecture I of Pragmatism (1907): The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. […] Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. […] Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more 1 See, e.g., most of UM I and III; GS 99, 335, 373; BGE 9–11, 59, 186–7, 204, 208–9; GM III, 6 and 14; TI, “The Problem of Socrates” and “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man.”