Matthieu Queloz

Welcome

I am an Ambizione Fellow at the University of Bern and incoming Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich. The thread running through my work is conceptual change: how our concepts arise and evolve, what makes some ways of thinking better than others, and how our thought and talk must adapt to the advent of cognitive systems whose forms of understanding differ radically from our own. I pursue these questions both as a historian of philosophy and as a philosopher of mind and language. Historically, I have reconstructed how early modern philosophers from Ramus and Keckermann to Leibniz and Kant came to make thought systematic, and how Hume and Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Williams explained the emergence and evolution of our concepts and norms by tracing them to the needs they serve. Systematically, I have developed an account of how concepts can be evaluated, engineered, and adapted to our needs, and I now lead a five-year project on concepts, understanding, and normativity in large language models: which forms of understanding and world models emerge in neural networks, how far they can reproduce normative judgement, and how far our concepts of understanding and reasoning can be stretched to fit them. The two strands meet in the wheel above: Llullian concept wheels inspired Leibniz’s calculus of concepts, which in turn inspired McCulloch and Pitts’s artificial neural networks. I see the emerging field of mechanistic interpretability as continuous with the early modern project of mechanistically reverse-engineering cognition, and I seek to develop insights from the philosophical tradition through interpretability work of my own. I am a member of the Digital Society Initiative and a founder of the Philosophy with Mechanistic Interpretability Network.

I have published three books with Oxford University Press, and my articles have appeared in Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Philosophers' Imprint, The Philosophical Quarterly, European Journal of Philosophy, The Monist, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Synthese, Analysis, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Minds and Machines, and Philosophy & Technology. In 2022, I received the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel and the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers.

I have organized my articles by whether they would be most of interest to someone coming from the theoretical, practical, or historical side of philosophy. To facilitate navigation by themes, I also built a system of tags and a search interface. The full site is available in English, French, or German. My last name is pronounced with a silent ‘z’ [ ˈkəloː ]. To contact me, you can send me an email. To be notified of new publications, follow me on Google Scholar.