20th-Century 8
Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically
With Marcel van Ackeren. In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 14–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.003.0003
Distinguishes four different connections between philosophy and history. (1) Philosophy cannot ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) When engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still has to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically—that is, primarily to produce philosophy—requires a keen sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. (4) Systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand.
methodology, historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century
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Williams’s Debt to Wittgenstein
In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 283–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. With Nikhil Krishnan.
Argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be interpreted as evolving dialectically from those of Wittgenstein.
history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, british philosophy, philosophy of language, Bernard Williams
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The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique
European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 226–247. 2023. With Nikhil Krishnan. doi:10.1111/ejop.12794
Offers a new reading of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by bringing out the wider cultural resonances of the book. Far from being simply a critique of academic tendencies, the book turns out to be about ethical issues that acquired particular urgency in the wake of WWII: the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life.
cultural critique, ethics, analytic philosophy, authority, 20th century, british philosophy
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Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche
The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026
Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century
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Davidsonian Causalism and Wittgensteinian Anti-Causalism: A Rapprochement
Ergo 5 (6): 153–72. 2018. doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.006
Seeks a rapprochement in the longstanding debate between Davidsonian causalists and Wittgensteinian anti-causalists by arguing that both sides can agree that reasons are not causes, but that intentional explanations are causal explanations.
reasons vs. causes, action explanation, explanation, analytic philosophy, 20th century, interpretation
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Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy
Studia Philosophica 76: 137–52. 2017. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2017.76008
Develops Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline.
historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, Williams
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Two Orders of Things: Wittgenstein on Reasons and Causes
Philosophy 92 (3): 369–97. 2017. doi:10.1017/S0031819117000055
Situating Wittgenstein in the causalism/anti-causalism debate in the philosophy of mind, this paper argues that Wittgenstein’s arguments differ from those of his immediate successors; that he anticipates current anti-psychologistic trends; and that he is perhaps closer to Davidson than historical dialectics suggest.
action theory, action explanation, analytic philosophy, reasons vs. causes, philosophy of language, 20th century
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Wittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons
Wittgenstein-Studien 7 (1): 105–30. 2016. doi:10.1515/witt-2016-0108
This article examines Wittgenstein’s conception of rationality through the central image of the “chain,” arguing that reasons are defined by their relational role in making actions intelligible rather than by intrinsic properties. The author contends that unlike chains of causes, chains of reasons are necessarily finite and anchored in communal reason-giving practices, meaning that justification inevitably ends at the boundaries of a specific language game. Ultimately, the paper suggests that this finite structure liberates agents from the misleading expectation of infinite justification while simultaneously limiting the reach of reasons to the specific practices that sustain them.
action theory, Wittgenstein, reasons and causes, philosophy of mind, explanation, justification
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