The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Open Access.

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? The Practical Origins of Ideas 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 find out 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.

A précis of the book, to appear in Analysis, is available here. A chapter-by-chapter summary of the book is available here. For essays introducing some of the book’s main ideas to a wider audience, see my pieces in Aeon and The Philosopher.

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.

Translations of The Practical Origins of Ideas:

The book has 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. In press, to appear open access in January 2025.

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This 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.

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.

Keywords: Philosophy, History, Philosophical Method, Genealogy, Metaphilosophy, Methodology of the History of Philosophy