History-of-Philosophy ³⁶

Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength

In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf

Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.

conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change

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

PDF coming soon

The Romantic Roots of Internalism

With Nikhil Krishnan.

Uncovers the links between reasons internalism and the Romantic tradition, and shows that internalism does not merely translate Romantic ideas into more technical language, but transforms them.

internalism, internal reasons, romanticism, conceptual change, history of philosophy, Krishnan

PDF coming soon

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

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

Moralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics

Political Philosophy 1 (2): 432–462. 2024. doi:10.16995/pp.17532

Argues that both moralism in ethics and political moralism originate from a problematic dualism that transforms the useful distinction between the moral and the non-moral into a rigid divide. As the historical comparison with ancient Greek thought shows, this obscures genuine conflicts of values and fails to adequately address complex political realities such as “dirty hands” situations.

ethics, political moralism, realism, conflicts of values, Hume, Bernard Williams

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

The Dworkin–Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1): 3–29. 2024. doi:10.1111/phpr.13002

By reconstructing the little-known Dworkin-Williams debate over whether political concepts like liberty and equality can and should be reconciled to avoid conflict, the article explores the nature of political values, the limits of philosophical intervention in politics, the challenge of pluralism, and the conditions for political legitimacy in the face of inevitable conflict and loss.

conceptual engineering, legitimacy, political realism, pluralism, Williams, conceptual change

Virtue Ethics and the Morality System

Topoi 43 (2): 413–424. 2024. With Marcel van Ackeren. doi:10.1007/s11245-023-09964-9

Shows that “morality systems” in Williams’s sense are not confined to Kantian ethics, but are characterized by the organizing ambition to shelter human agency from contingency. Argues that this ambition and the reconceptualization of human psychology it draws on can be traced back to Stoicism.

ethics, moral luck, morality system, moral psychology, blame, normativity

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

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

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

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

A Shelter from Luck: The Morality System Reconstructed

In Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), 184–211. New York: Oxford University Press. 2022. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197626566.003.0009

Offers a synthesis of Williams’s critical remarks on Kantian morality; the key idea is that modern morality strives to shelter life from luck.

agency, ethics, blame, moral luck, morality system, voluntariness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nietzsche as a Critic of Genealogical Debunking: Making Room for Naturalism without Subversion

The Monist 102 (3): 277–297. 2019. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1093/monist/onz010

Argues that contrary to popular belief, Nietzsche’s genealogical method does not seek to subvert by revealing immanent and lowly naturalistic origins—quite the opposite: Nietzsche is a critic of genealogical debunking thus conceived, on the grounds that it threatens to make a universal acid of reflection in a world increasingly disenchanted by scientific advances. Instead, Nietzsche advocates an outlook which makes room for naturalistic understanding and redraws the contrast between vindicatory and subversive genealogies within the space of naturalistic origins.

genealogical debunking, genealogy, metaethics, naturalism, continental philosophy, 19th century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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