Genealogy ²⁴

Systematizers: Reason, Machines, and the Rise of Systematic Thought in Early Modern Philosophy, 1500–1800

Book manuscript.

Philosophers tend to treat the drive towards systematic thought as a timeless demand of rationality. But there is a counter-tradition warning this “will to a system” can function as a substitute for moral character, an aesthetic fetish, or a dangerous universalization machine. In response to these critics of systematization, this book offers a genealogical reconstruction of the ideal of cognitive systematicity between 1500 and 1800, asking not just how thought became systematic, but why.

Moving beyond the standard historical explanation, which assumes systems were built merely to mirror the metaphysical blueprint of a rationally designed universe, the book argues that early modern thinkers introduced the demand for cognitive systematization in an effort to emulate the virtues of well-designed machines. By modeling cognitive on mechanical virtues, these systematizers transferred the authority of knowledge from the internal, personal dispositions (the habitus) of individual thinkers into freestanding, externalized architectures. Through historical case studies ranging from Ramus and Keckermann through Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Cavendish through Leibniz, Newton, and Du Châtelet to Diderot, D’Alembert, Rousseau, and Kant, the book uncovers three distinct practical rationales that drove this mechanization of thought:

• The Pedagogical Rationale: Systematization made knowledge transmissible.
• The Epistemological Rationale: Systematization made thought self-certifying and self-correcting.
• The Political Rationale: Systematization made public authority accountable, administrable, and fair.

While these rationales vindicate the systematic impulse as a practical necessity rather than an arbitrary quirk, the genealogy also traces a counter-tradition, from Margaret Cavendish’s vitalism through Diderot’s polyphony to Hegelian ethical critiques, that exposes the costs of emulating the virtues of machines. Pushed too far, the demand for systematicity flattens experience, strips away context-sensitive “thick” concepts, and risks becoming nothing but dogmatic machinery. The book thus provides a delimiting framework for understanding both the indispensable value of systematizing thought and the importance of recognizing its limits.

systematicity, genealogy, early modern philosophy, conceptual needs, rationalism, authority

The Invented Inventor: Adapting Intellectual Property to Generative AI

Under review

As AI increasingly drives discovery, the concept of inventor faces severe strain. Recent judicial decisions, such as the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s 2025 DABUS ruling, expose a deepening tension: courts demand intellectual creation by a natural person even as human contributions to AI-assisted discovery become increasingly nominal. This paper approaches the resulting tension from the standpoint of political philosophy rather than jurisprudence: the strain AI places on the concept of inventorship is too fundamental to be resolved by interpretative methods taking existing conceptual architectures for granted. Inspired by Hume’s genealogy of property, the paper reconstructs the historical “need matrices” that forged the concept of inventorship, tracing its evolution from Venetian guild economics through Romantic genius ideology to corporate R&D. This reveals the concept to be an overburdened bundle serving four social functions: incentivising innovation, disseminating knowledge, legitimating monopolies, and resolving priority disputes. It also clarifies the mismatch between the concept and the emerging realities of AI-driven discovery. To resolve this mismatch, we must disaggregate the concept of inventorship and develop specialised conceptual resources for each of these functions. If we invented the notion of inventor to perform certain functions, we can reinvent it to perform them better.

intellectual property rights, patents, inventor, genealogy, AI, conceptual adaptation

Naturalizing Minds: Genealogies of Thought in Hume and Nietzsche

In Hume and Nietzsche. Peter Kail and Paolo Stellino (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Claims that once we recognize the genealogical form taken by Hume’s and Nietzsche’s methodological pragmatism, we can see how both manage to avoid cruder views that identify the meaning, truth, or value of things with their effects.

genealogy, methodological pragmatism, Hume, Nietzsche, 18th century, truth

Une normativité sans histoire ? Foucault, Engel et la normativité de la vérité

Forthcoming in Dialogue : Revue canadienne de philosophie

By shielding the concept of truth from Foucauldian historicism, Pascal Engel ends up leaving the “virtues of truth” even more exposed to Foucault’s negative genealogy. This article proposes a more ambitious reading of the positive genealogy of these virtues, demonstrating that cultivating accuracy and sincerity as intrinsic values is a functional necessity rather than a historical accident. Vindicating these dispositions’ status as virtues provides a more robust defence against both Foucauldian cynicism and contemporary indifference to truth.

truth, normativity, epistemic norms, epistemic virtues, belief, assertion

Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History

Edited with Marcel van Ackeren. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.001.0001

For Bernard Williams, philosophy and history are importantly connected. His work exploits this connection in a number of directions: he believes that philosophy cannot ignore its own history the way science can; that even when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one needs to draw on philosophy; and that when doing the history of philosophy primarily to produce philosophy, one still needs a sense of how historically distant past philosophers are, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. But Williams also holds that systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not just with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand. To explore these different ways in which philosophy and history intertwine, this volume assembles specially commissioned contributions by A. W. Moore, Terence Irwin, Sophie Grace Chappell, Catherine Rowett, Marcel van Ackeren, John Cottingham, Gerald Lang, Lorenzo Greco, Paul Russell, Carla Bagnoli, Peter Kail, David Owen, Giuseppina D’Oro, James Connelly, Matthieu Queloz, Nikhil Krishnan, John Marenbon, Ralph Wedgwood, Garrett Cullity, Hans-Johann Glock, Geraldine Ng, Ilaria Cozzaglio, Amanda R. Greene, and Miranda Fricker. They critically appraise Williams’s work in and on the history of philosophy as well as his ‘historicist turn’ and his use of genealogy. The resulting collection uniquely combines substantive discussions of historical figures from Homer to Wittgenstein with methodological discussions of how and why the history of philosophy should be done, and how and why philosophy should draw on history.

Internalism from the Ethnographic Stance: From Self-Indulgence to Self-Expression and Corroborative Sense-Making

The Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3): 1094–1120. 2025. doi:10.1093/pq/pqae051

Argues that Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons is the philosophical underpinning of his liberalism, and that it needs to be understood in relation to his later work on the normativity of genealogical explanation and the ethnographic stance, where we imaginatively inhabit a conceptual and motivational perspective without endorsing it.

deliberation, ethics, genealogy, history, internalism, metaethics

Defending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering

Analysis 84 (2): 385–400. 2024. Symposium on my The Practical Origins of Ideas. By invitation. doi:10.1093/analys/anad010

Responds to commentaries by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth.

analysis, concepts, conceptual engineering, conceptual reverse-engineering, genealogy, history

Précis of The Practical Origins of Ideas

Analysis 84 (2): 341–344. 2024. Symposium on my The Practical Origins of Ideas. By invitation. doi:10.1093/analys/anad011

Summarizes my book for a symposium in Analysis.

analysis, conceptual engineering, genealogy, history of ideas, state of nature, book symposium

Debunking Concepts

Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1): 195–225. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.5840/msp2023111347

Argues that the debunking of concepts should extend beyond assessing their epistemological merits to include their evaluation on moral, social, and political grounds, based on their societal functions and effects.

concepts, conceptual ethics, genealogical debunking, genealogy, ideology critique, methodology

Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Mind 132 (525): 234–243. 2023. doi:10.1093/mind/fzaa077

Reviews a collection of essays on Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and offers a substantive defense of Williams against Humean critiques, arguing that Williams does employ vindicatory genealogies for basic ethical concepts like obligation, but separates these from their distortion within the morality system. Synthesizes diverse interpretations of Williams’s relativism of distance and practical necessity, recasting them not as skepticism but as inquiries into authenticity and the irreducible first-person nature of deliberation. Frames the collection as evidence that Williams’s project was not merely destructive, but a liberating attempt to legitimize ethical thoughts that exist outside the rigid constraints of modern moral theory.

Bernard Williams, ethics, genealogy, morality system, metaethics, deliberation

On the Self-Undermining Functionality Critique of Morality

European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2): 501–508. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.1111/ejop.12874

Reconstructs Reginster’s account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality as a “self-undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it.

functionality, function, genealogy, genealogical debunking, metaethics, morality

Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering

The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010

Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.

conceptual engineering, legitimacy, genealogy, ideology critique, conceptual ethics, international institutions

Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics

Inquiry 66 (7): 1335–1364. Proceedings of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies. 2023. doi:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2164049

While Nietzsche appears to engage in two seemingly contrary modes of concept evaluation—one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express—this article offers an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes and yields a powerful approach to practical reflection on which concepts to use.

conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, genealogy, naturalism, revaluation of values, expressivism

Theorizing the Normative Significance of Critical Histories for International Law

Journal of the History of International Law 24 (4): 561–587. 2022. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1163/15718050-12340207

Addresses the question of whether the tainted history of international law should affect our present-day evaluation of it. It argues that critical histories derive their power in three primary ways: by subverting the historical claims that support a practice’s authority, by failing to meet the normative expectations readers bring to the past, and by tracing the functional continuities that link past problems to the present. The framework explains how history can be normatively significant even when its direct influence on legal argument is unclear.

genealogy, historiography, legitimacy, legal philosophy, methodology, political theory

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

Nietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (2): 341–63. 2021. doi:10.1515/agph-2018-0048

Based on various posthumous fragments, the article reconstructs Nietzsche’s little-known early genealogical account of how the value of truth and the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness originated not from a pure love of truth, but from the practical necessity of social cooperation.

genealogy, 19th century, Nietzsche, continental philosophy, truthfulness, social cooperation

The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.

Whence the Demand for Ethical Theory?

American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2): 135–46. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.2307/48614001

Offers a practical derivation of the need for public and judicial reasoning to take a more discursive and consistent form than private deliberation (a theme more fully explored in ch. 10 of my second book).

public reason, ethical theory, genealogy, metaethics, legitimacy, conceptual change

From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy

Mind 129 (515): 683–714. 2020. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy083

Why would philosophers interested in the points or functions of our conceptual practices bother with genealogical explanations if they can focus directly on paradigmatic examples of the practices we now have? This paper offers three reasons why the genealogical approach earns its keep and formulates criteria for determining when it is called for.

explanation, functions, genealogy, history, historiography, methodology

How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons

Synthese 197 (5): 2005–2027. 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9

Attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something are often said to commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems.

genealogy, Bernard Williams, Craig, epistemology, normativity, space of reasons

Revealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies

In Social Functions in Philosophy: Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives. Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael Van Riel (eds.), 200–218. London: Routledge. 2020. doi:10.4324/9780429435393

This paper argues that state-of-nature stories, read as dynamic models rather than history, can reveal how key normative practices meet collective needs of coordination, conflict-management, and non-domination. Drawing on Hume’s genealogy of justice, Williams’s genealogy of truthfulness, and related work, it shows how concepts like property, knowledge, and testimonial justice underpin social cooperation and political legitimacy. In doing so, it offers social and political philosophers a way to explain both the persistence of ideas and institutions and the grounds on which they can be criticized.

coordination, genealogy, history, Hume, Nietzsche, political philosophy

Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?

The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 100–120. 2019. doi:10.1093/pq/pqy041

Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology holds that the concept of knowledge is primitive and explanatorily fundamental. This seems to leave little room for attempts to give a genealogical explanation of the concept of knowledge, much less ones that explain the formation of the concept of knowledge in terms of the concept of belief, as E.J. Craig does. Yet I argue that Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge not only is compatible with knowledge-first epistemology, but actually lends succour to it.

Craig, epistemology, genealogy, methodology, Williams, knowledge-first epistemology

Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality

Philosophers’ Imprint 18 (17): 1–20. 2018. doi:2027/spo.3521354.0018.017

Reconstructs Williams’s genealogical investigation into the social function of the norms of truthfulness and brings out its social and political implications. Develops an understanding of this “pragmatic” form of the genealogical method which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call “self-effacing functionality”—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality.

Bernard Williams, ethics, functionality, genealogy, naturalism, truth

Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 727–49. 2017. doi:10.1080/09608788.2016.1266462

Examines Nietzsche’s view that the ideal of justice is a contingent political development emerging only when parties of roughly equal power need a system of exchange and requital to avoid mutually assured destruction, meaning the applicability of norms of justice is originally tied to distributions of power. This perspective reframes justice as a human-made solution to the recurring problem of social order. Understanding these origins vindicates justice as an indispensable invention for social life.

genealogy, power, political philosophy, 19th century, justice, Nietzsche