Précis of The Practical Origins of Ideas (in: Analysis)

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021

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? This book 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. Availabe open access at: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-practical-origins-of-ideas-9780198868705?/&promocode=AAFLYG6

Analysis

In this paper, I respond to three critical notices of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, written by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth, respectively. After contrasting genealogical conceptual reverse-engineering with conceptual reverse-engineering, I discuss pragmatic genealogy’s relation to history. I argue that it would be a mistake to understand pragmatic genealogy as a fiction (or a model, or an idealization) as opposed to a form of historical explanation. That would be to rely on precisely the stark dichotomy between idealization and history that I propose to call into question. Just as some historical explanations begin with a functional hypothesis arrived at through idealization as abstraction, some pragmatic genealogies embody an abstract form of historiography, stringing together, in a way that is loosely indexed to certain times and places, the most salient needs responsible for giving a concept the contours it now has. I then describe the naturalistic stance that I find expressed in the pragmatic genealogies I consider in the book before examining the evaluative standard at work in those genealogies, defusing the charge that they involve a commitment to a ‘stingy axiology’.

Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons

Pragmatic genealogies seek to explain ideas by regarding them, primarily, not as answers to philosophical questions, but as practical solutions to practical problems. Here I argue that pragmatic genealogies can inform the formation of philosophical canons. But the rationale for resorting to genealogy in this connection is not the familiar one that genealogy renders the concepts of the present intelligible by relating them to the concerns of the pastthe claim is rather the reverse one, that genealogy renders the concepts of the past intelligible by relating them to the concerns of the present: past thinkers can be made to speak to us by revealing how their ideas tie in with our concerns, in the sense of helping us to remedy practical problems we still face in some form.

Genealogy, 2023

What is philosophical genealogy? What is its purpose? How does genealogy achieve this purpose? These are the three essential questions to ask when thinking about philosophical genealogy. Although there has been an upswell of articles in the secondary literature exploring these questions in the last decade or two, the answers provided are unsatisfactory. Why do replies to these questions leave scholars wanting? Why is the question, "What is philosophical genealogy?" still being asked? There are two broad reasons, I think. First, on the substantive side, the problem is that genealogical models will get certain features of the method right but ignore others. The models proffered to answer the first question are too restrictive. The second reason is that the three essential questions to ask regarding the nature of genealogy are run together when they should be treated separately. In the following paper, I address these problems by attempting to reconstruct genealogy from the ground up. I provide what I hope is an ecumenical position on genealogy that will accommodate a wide variety of genealogical thinkers, from Hobbes to Nietzsche, rather than a select few. Therefore, I examine two of the three questions above: What is philosophical genealogy and its purpose? I argue there are seven main features of genealogy and that these features may be used as a yardstick to compare how one genealogist stacks up to another along the seven aspects I outline in the paper.

Giornale di Metafisica, 2016

This article deals with the relationship between history and philosophy, and tries to clarify that connection through an examination of the practice of genealogical writing. Does philosophy have a role in writing history? Does history have a role in philosophy? Can we think of Foucault's genealogies as a way of writing history? If it is not history, should it be philosophy? Foucault rejects this possibility. Might Nietzsche's genealogies also be understood as a way to practice history? Genealogy, in a broad sense, can be thought of as a style of writing philosophy that is inseparable from history. This article claims that the original "philosophical-genealogical" paradigm that brings together history and philosophy was developed by Hegel. We can think of his narrative of the history of spirit as a kind of genealogy of freedom. That primordial genealogical paradigm allows us to define genealogy as way of representing convergence between logos and genesis. However, the bibliography on the genealogical-philosophical approach lacks an analysis of genealogy in Hegel. In this article I will compare three different paradigms that deal with this convergence: those of Hegel, Nietzsche and Foucault. These three philosophers are not arbitrarily linked, since the latter two are trying to escape from the Hegelian paradigm, as Foucault himself affirms: «Our entire epoch, whether in logic or epistemology, whether in Marx or Nietzsche, is trying to escape from Hegel: and what I have tried to say just now about discourse is very unfaithful to the Hegelian logos [...]. But to make a real escape from Hegel presupposes an exact appreciation of what it costs to detach ourselves from him. It presupposes knowledge of how close Hegel has come to us, perhaps insidiously. It presupposes a knowledge of what it is still Hegelian in what which allows to think against Hegel; and an ability to gauge how much our resources against him are perhaps, still a ruse which he is using against us, and at the end of which he is waiting for us, immobile and elsewhere» 1 .

Mind, 2020

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? To answer this question, I compare the method of pragmatic genealogy advocated by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker—a method whose singular combination of fictionalising and historicising has met with suspicion—with the simpler method of paradigm-based explanation. Fricker herself has recently moved towards paradigm-based explanation, arguing that it is a more perspicuous way of reaping the same explanatory pay-off as pragmatic genealogy while dispensing with its fictionalising and historicising. My aim is to determine when and why the reverse movement from paradigm-based explanation to pragmatic genealogy remains warranted. I argue that the fictionalising and historicising of pragmatic genealogy is well-motivated, and I outline three ways in which the method earns its keep: by successfully handling historically inflected practices which paradigm-based explanation cannot handle; by revealing and arguing for connections to generic needs we might otherwise miss; and by providing comprehensive views of practices that place and relate the respects in which they serve both generic and local needs.

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2019

This paper examines three reasons to think that Craig's genealogy of the concept of knowledge is incompatible with knowledge-first epistemology and finds that far from being incompatible with it, the genealogy lends succour to it. This reconciliation turns on two ideas. First, the genealogy is not history, but a dynamic model of needs. Second, by recognising the continuity of Craig's genealogy with Williams's genealogy of truthfulness, we can see that while both genealogies start out from specific needs explaining what drives the development of certain concepts rather than others, they then factor in less specific needs which in reality do not come later at all, and which have also left their mark on these concepts. These genealogies thereby reveal widespread functional dynamics driving what I call the de-instrumentalisation of concepts, the recognition of which adds to the plausibility of such instrumentalist approaches to concepts.

Practices of Truth in Philosophy: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge), 2023

This chapter has two main, interconnected goals. On the one hand, I argue that, even though the major forms taken by genealogy throughout the history of philosophy seem to make it impervious to truth, there is an important sense in which genealogy, specifically as conceived of and practiced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is a practice of truth. How to make sense of this claim? The first two sections address this question and show that the (Nietzschean and Foucauldian) genealogist aims to produce “new truths” that function as disruptive ethico-political forces destabilizing current modes of thinking and being, and creating the concrete possibility for the emergence of new possibilities for thought and action. The third and final section, on the other hand, builds on these insights to argue that Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric writings, too, can be construed as genealogical practices of truth.

Anthony Jensen & Carlotte Santini eds., Nietzsche on Memory and History: the Re-Encountered Shadow, 2020

I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of origins. I am interested here in distinguishing what is different, and pardon the pun, original, in Nietzsche’s concepts of origins and genealogies by comparing it with the alternative mythical, rationalist, and scientific concepts of origins. I identify four types of origins that share family relations: Mythical, Rationalist, Genealogical, and Scientific. I distinguish between them according to six criteria: The ontology of the origins and what they transfer; how they transfer what they transfer; whether what they transfer is path dependent on the origin; teleology, do origins have a manifest destiny; value judgements about the origins, positive, negative, both, or neither; and finally, the epistemology of the inference of origins.

The Philosophical Quarterly

This paper examines three reasons to think that Craig's genealogy of the concept of knowledge is incompatible with knowledge-first epistemology and finds that far from being incompatible with it, the genealogy lends succour to it. This reconciliation turns on two ideas. First, the genealogy is not history, but a dynamic model of needs. Second, by recognising the continuity of Craig's genealogy with 12 Craig describes his method as 'conceptual' or 'pragmatic synthesis' or 'practical explication' (1990: 8, 141). In his Wittgenstein lectures in Bayreuth, he speaks of his 'pragmatic method' (1993: 44). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.