History ¹²

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

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

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

Making Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies

In Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons. Sandra Lapointe and Erich Reck (eds.), 171–191. New York: Routledge. 2023. doi:10.4324/9781003184294-9

Instead of treating Hobbes and Hume as answering the same questions we ask today, this article proposes that we start from the practical predicaments their political concepts addressed in their own time. Hume’s account of property and Hobbes’s account of sovereign power are reconstructed as historically local, yet structurally revealing, responses to predicaments—over conflict, security, and cooperation—that still structure our political life.

historiography, history, Hume, early modern philosophy, 18th century, political philosophy

The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology

Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1591–1620. 2022. doi:10.1007/s11098-021-01720-2

Argues that the notion of the voluntary is an essentially superficial notion that does important work on the condition that we do not try to metaphysically deepen it, and that attempts to deepen it illustrate a problematic tendency to warp our conception of the mind under pressure from moral aspirations.

history, justice, moral psychology, agency, responsibility, philosophy of action

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

Left Wittgensteinianism

European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603

Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.

conceptual change, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, history, Bernard Williams, language games

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.

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

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

Nietzsches affirmative Genealogien

Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67 (3): 429–439. By invitation. 2019. doi:10.1515/dzph-2019-0034

Argues that alongside his well-known critical genealogies, Nietzsche also developed “affirmative genealogies” that are not historically situated. These genealogies investigate the “practical origins” of concepts like justice and truth, showing how they arise instrumentally from fundamental human needs. By presenting these concepts as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable, this approach offers an affirmative justification, which I connect to Nietzsche’s later idea of an “economic justification of morality.”

genealogy, history, justice, morality, Nietzsche, truth