Matthieu Queloz
Matthieu Queloz

Methodology 10

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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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

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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

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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

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On Ordered Pluralism

Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (3): 305–11. 2019. doi:10.1080/24740500.2020.1859234

Beginning with the debate concerning “moral justice forgiveness” and “gifted” forgiveness, this paper critically examines Miranda Fricker’s method for ordering plural conceptions of a practice. It argues that the selection of a paradigm case, such as “moral justice forgiveness,” is not absolute, but depends on which functional aspect of the practice one wishes to explain.

Fricker, conceptual engineering, metaethics, methodology, pluralism, moral psychology

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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

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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

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