I’m a Privatdozent at the University of Bern and an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Before that, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford for three years. In 2022, I was awarded the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel as well as the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers of the Lauener Foundation for Analytical Philosophy.
I work at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and language with moral and political philosophy. My work is also deeply informed by the history of philosophy and genealogical methods in philosophy. I have advocated the relevance of historical perspectives to contemporary philosophy in a number of contexts, and done exegetical work on Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Ryle, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, P. F. Strawson, Donald Davidson, Ronald Dworkin, and Bernard Williams. I’ve grouped my papers by whether they would be most of interest to someone coming from the history of philosophy, from theoretical philosophy, or from practical philosophy, with some papers appearing repeatedly if they straddle these divides.
My last name is pronounced with a silent ‘z’, i.e. [ kəˈloː ]. I can be reached by email at matthieu.queloz@unibe.ch. You can also find me in the following places: PhilPeople ∙ Google Scholar ∙ Academia.edu ∙ OrcID
I have published two monographs and an edited collection:
The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Open Access.
My first book, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, was published open access by Oxford University Press in 2021 and can be downloaded for free here. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of telling partly fictional, partly historical genealogical narratives with a view to exploring what might have driven us to develop some of our most abstract and seemingly idle ideas. It is shown how this tradition cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. An essay in Aeon offers an accessible introduction to some of the book’s main themes. You can also hear me give a talk on the book to the Moral Sciences Club of the University of Cambridge here.
Reception of The Practical Origins of Ideas:
Winner of the Amerbach Prize 2022. Selected for Oxford University Press’s Best of Philosophy collection as one of the Top 10 Books of 2021.
“superb … [a] splendid book. … Queloz’s The Practical Origins of Ideas will stand as one of the most important pragmatist treatises on conceptual engineering.” —Cheryl Misak, Analysis
“Unlike a lot of contemporary scholarship, the book is refreshingly ambitious. … The book is also delightful to read: the prose is colorful, elegant, and sharp, and Queloz has a knack for bringing high-minded ideals down to earth. I wish more philosophers wrote so well. Overall, it is an excellent and important piece of philosophy.” —Michael Hannon, Mind
“this is a great book … the prose has a kind of effortless elegance that reminds one of the book’s primary inspiration, Bernard Williams. It is possible to read it for pleasure, not merely from duty.” —Alexander Prescott-Couch, Analysis
“Queloz’s prose is clear and the book is never dull, and it will be interesting to those working on methodological issues in contemporary philosophy. … there is a tremendous amount to be learned from this very stimulating book.” —P. J. E. Kail, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
“[A] ground-breaking book … Queloz not only has given his readers an excellent example of how to do philosophy, but also has done more than anyone in recent times to reanimate debate about what makes philosophy relevant.” —Paul A. Roth, Analysis
“Matthieu Queloz’s exciting new book … is clear, impressively erudite, well-structured, sensitive to both historical and systematic questions about genealogy and advances the debate about the genealogical method. It is an invaluable contribution to the ever-growing literature surrounding genealogical arguments and anyone interested in such debates cannot afford to overlook it.” —Christos Kyriacou, The Journal of Value Inquiry
“The Practical Origins of Ideas is a substantial contribution of great value … Queloz presents an important thesis: pragmatic genealogy not only acknowledges the legitimacy of both local historical genealogies and of genealogies that reconstruct an idealised starting situation, but also, and above all, enables us to see these two different approaches as two phases of a single pragmatic genealogical method.” —Matteo Santarelli, Iride
“Matthieu Queloz’s The Practical Origins of Ideas is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the role of concepts in philosophy. By synthesizing genealogy and conceptual engineering, Queloz offers a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of philosophical ideas … a significant step forward in the study of conceptual engineering and genealogy, offering new tools for the analysis and improvement of philosophical concepts.” —Syumbel Zainullina, Philosophy
Discussions of the book have also appeared in Ergo, on the online platform Medium, and in the South China Morning Post. The book has also been translated into Arabic. For enquiries concerning translations into other languages, please contact the translation team of Oxford University Press at translation.rights@oup.com
The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. Open Access.
My most recent book, The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need, appeared open access with Oxford University Press in 2025 and can be downloaded for free here. The question at the heart of the book is why we should accept a given conceptualization or definition—a question that has a rich history in philosophy, but that also arises in science and politics. To answer this question, the book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things, even when they are as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.
Reception of The Ethics of Conceptualization:
The book was chosen to be subject of the Bielefeld Masterclass in Philosophy 2024.
“What are the grounds on which we should select the best concepts to use in representing our world and our psychology, in framing our ethical and political ideals? Matthieu Queloz offers an incisive and comprehensive exploration of how this issue has been, and ought to be, answered. The book, which argues persuasively for a needs-based response, promises to be a major contribution to a growing research program.” ––Philip Pettit, L.S.Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values, Princeton University, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University
“One of the most sophisticated and subtle book-length works on metaphilosophical issues to come out within the last decade. This is a book that takes a step back and re-plots the logical terrain of its subject from a new perspective. Queloz draws from several key figures who have been given very little attention in the conceptual engineering literature-Nietzsche, Williams, Dworkin, and Murdoch, to name a few. But beyond these central inspirations, Queloz also displays an incredible depth of knowledge across a wide variety of fields, both across philosophy and beyond it.” ––Jennifer Nado, Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong
Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History
Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. In Press.
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.