In the first doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche in the United States, Cornell University philosophy student Grace Neal Dolson agreed that the Nietzsche vogue hardly justified scholarly interest in him, or warranted a philosophy dissertation on him. But she argued that to reckon with Nietzsche was simply to confront head on “the general intellectual movement of the past decades…. In one sense, he was inevitable.” Nietzsche had observed how the increasingly naturalistic view of the universe made a mockery of moral commitments.
