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 soonAnalysis 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
Download PDFAnalysis 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
Download PDFInquiry 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
Download PDFThe 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
Download PDFPhilosophers’ 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
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