History of Philosophy
History of Philosophy
My work on the history of philosphy ranges from Early Modern theorists of the state of nature and the ideal of systematicity through Nietzsche to twentieth-century ordinary language philosophers and their existentialist inheritance. My most sustained exegetical efforts to date have been concentrated on Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bernard Williams, but much of my historical work has been structured in terms of themes rather than figures. The main themes have been the following:
- The tradition of state-of-nature genealogies (Hobbes, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Nietzsche, B. Williams, E. J. Craig, Miranda Fricker, Philip Pettit), which is the topic of my first monograph, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (OUP 2021) and several papers (Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering; Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality; Nietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness).
- The history of evaluative standards for concepts (Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Murdoch, P. F. Strawson, Sellars, Rorty, Diamond), which is the topic of my second monograph, The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need (OUP 2025) and several papers (Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics; Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche; Needs of the Mind).
- The development of theories of liberty and the will (Davidsonian Causalism and Wittgensteinian Anti-Causalism; The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology).
- The history of how different conceptions of morality handle luck and conflicts of values (from Aristotle and the Stoics to Kant, Nietzsche, Williams, and Dworkin—see A Shelter from Luck; Virtue Ethics and the Morality System; Moralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics).
- The history of the ideal of cognitive systematicity (Leibniz, Lambert, Kant, Bradley, Rescher—see Whence the Demand for Ethical Theory?; Explainability through Systematicity).
- The history of the reasons/causes distinction and the genetic fallacy (Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering; Two Orders of Things: Wittgenstein on Reasons and Causes; Wittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons).
- The social and intellectual history of Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique; The Dworkin–Williams Debate; Williams’s Debt to Wittgenstein).
- The significance of history, including philosophy’s own history, to philosophy. I co-edited a volume on philosophy’s relation to history—including its own history—through the lens of Williams’s work in and on the history of philosophy (Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History (OUP 2025)), and have repeatedly explored various rationales for engaging with the history of philosophy (Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically; Making Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies; Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History?).
Selected Articles on the History of Philosophy
Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice, British Journal for the History of Philosophy
Nietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie
Nietzsche as a Critic of Genealogical Debunking, The Monist
Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics, Inquiry
Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality, Philosophers’ Imprint
The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique, European Journal of Philosophy
Virtue Ethics and the Morality System, Topoi
The Dworkin–Williams Debate, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche, The Philosophical Quarterly
Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering, The Monist
Two Orders of Things: Wittgenstein on Reasons and Causes, Philosophy
Making Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies, in Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons
Detailed List
Explication or Amelioration? Carnapian Clarification as the Normative Basis for Conceptual Engineering
The Monist. Special issue on Explication and Conceptual Engineering.
As conceptual engineering fractures into explication pursuing exactness and amelioration pursuing justice, the field risks losing its focus. I argue that unifying these projects requires retrieving a crucial insight from Rudolf Carnap: that attempts to improve concepts must start with the preliminary stage of practical clarification. However, Carnap’s account of clarification in terms of predictive proficiency remains normatively inert and biased towards exactness. I expand it into a normative diagnosis of the needs underpinning a concept’s inferential structure. This reveals whether properties like vagueness are flaws that need fixing or features worth preserving.
Carnap, clarification, normativity, explication, amelioration, conceptual engineering
Download PDFLaw as a Test of Conceptual Strength
In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf
Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.
conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change
Download PDFNaturalizing Minds: Genealogies of Thought in Hume and Nietzsche
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 soonNeeds of the Mind: How the Aptic Normativity of Needs Can Guide Conceptual Adaptation
R&R at Philosophical Studies.
The article offers an account of “needs of the mind” in terms of a distinctively aptic normativity–a normativity of fittingness. After reconstructing the history of different conceptions of needs and their gradual subjectivization, the article focuses on conceptual needs and argues that they register a cognitive privation that goes beyond a shortage of words, marking a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation that reorients conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. This makes a needs-first approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of technological disruption.
conceptual adaptation, needs, aptic normativity, privacy, philosophy of language, functions
Download PDFThe Romantic Roots of Internalism
With Nikhil Krishnan.
Uncovers the links between reasons internalism and the Romantic tradition, and shows that internalism does not merely translate Romantic ideas into more technical language, but transforms them.
internalism, internal reasons, romanticism, conceptual change, history of philosophy, Krishnan
PDF coming soonDoing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically
With Marcel van Ackeren. In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 14–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.003.0003
Distinguishes four different connections between philosophy and history. (1) philosophy cannot ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) When engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still has to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically—that is, primarily to produce philosophy—requires a keen sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. (4) Systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand.
methodology, historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century
Download PDFExplainability through Systematicity: The Hard Systematicity Challenge for Artificial Intelligence
Minds and Machines 35 (35): 1–39. 2025. doi:10.1007/s11023-025-09738-9
Offers a framework for thinking about “the systematicity of thought” that distinguishes four senses of the phrase, defuses the alleged tension between systematicity and connectionism that Fodor and Pylyshyn influentially diagnosed, and identifies a “hard” form of the systematicity challenge that continues to defy connectionist models.
AI, explainable AI, philosophy of AI, rationality, systematicity, conceptual change
Download PDFInternalism from the Ethnographic Stance: From Self-Indulgence to Self-Expression and Corroborative Sense-Making
The Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3): 1094–1120. 2025. doi:10.1093/pq/pqae051
Argues that Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons is the philosophical underpinning of his liberalism, and that it needs to be understood in relation to his later work on the normativity of genealogical explanation and the ethnographic stance, where we imaginatively inhabit a conceptual and motivational perspective without endorsing it.
deliberation, ethics, genealogy, history, internalism, metaethics
Download PDFWilliams’s Debt to Wittgenstein
In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 283–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. With Nikhil Krishnan.
Argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be interpreted as evolving dialectically from those of Wittgenstein.
history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, british philosophy, philosophy of language, Bernard Williams
Download PDFDefending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
Analysis 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 PDFMoralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics
Political Philosophy 1 (2): 432–462. 2024. doi:10.16995/pp.17532
Argues that both moralism in ethics and political moralism originate from a problematic dualism that transforms the useful distinction between the moral and the non-moral into a rigid divide. As the historical comparison with ancient Greek thought shows, this obscures genuine conflicts of values and fails to adequately address complex political realities such as “dirty hands” situations.
ethics, ethical theory, value conflict, moral luck, agency, responsibility
Download PDFPrécis of The Practical Origins of Ideas
Analysis 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 PDFThe Dworkin–Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1): 3–29. 2024. doi:10.1111/phpr.13002
By reconstructing the little-known Dworkin-Williams debate over whether political concepts like liberty and equality can and should be reconciled to avoid conflict, the article explores the nature of political values, the limits of philosophical intervention in politics, the challenge of pluralism, and the conditions for political legitimacy in the face of inevitable conflict and loss.
conceptual engineering, legitimacy, political realism, pluralism, Williams, conceptual change
Download PDFVirtue Ethics and the Morality System
Topoi 43 (2): 413–424. 2024. With Marcel van Ackeren. doi:10.1007/s11245-023-09964-9
Shows that “morality systems” in Williams’s sense are not confined to Kantian ethics, but are characterized by the organizing ambition to shelter human agency from contingency. Argues that this ambition and the reconceptualization of human psychology it draws on can be traced back to Stoicism.
ethics, moral luck, morality system, moral psychology, blame, normativity
Download PDFMaking Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons. Sandra Lapointe and Erich Reck (eds.), 171–191. New York: Routledge. 2023. doi:10.4324/9781003184294-9
Instead of treating Hobbes and Hume as answering the same questions we ask today, this article proposes that we start from the practical predicaments their political concepts addressed in their own time. Hume’s account of property and Hobbes’s account of sovereign power are reconstructed as historically local, yet structurally revealing, responses to predicaments—over conflict, security, and cooperation—that still structure our political life.
historiography, history, Hume, early modern philosophy, 18th century, political philosophy
Download PDFOn the Self-Undermining Functionality Critique of Morality
European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2): 501–508. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.1111/ejop.12874
Reconstructs Reginster’s account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality as a “self-undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it.
functionality, function, genealogy, genealogical debunking, metaethics, morality
Download PDFThe Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique
European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 226–247. 2023. With Nikhil Krishnan. doi:10.1111/ejop.12794
Offers a new reading of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by bringing out the wider cultural resonances of the book. Far from being simply a critique of academic tendencies, the book turns out to be about ethical issues that acquired particular urgency in the wake of WWII: the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life.
cultural critique, ethics, analytic philosophy, authority, 20th century, british philosophy
Download PDFA Shelter from Luck: The Morality System Reconstructed
In Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), 184–211. New York: Oxford University Press. 2022. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197626566.003.0009
Offers a synthesis of Williams’s critical remarks on Kantian morality; the key idea is that modern morality strives to shelter life from luck.
agency, ethics, blame, moral luck, morality system, voluntariness
Download PDFGenealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering
The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010
Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.
conceptual engineering, legitimacy, genealogy, ideology critique, conceptual ethics, international institutions
Download PDFNietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics
Inquiry 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 Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology
Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1591–1620. 2022. doi:10.1007/s11098-021-01720-2
Argues that the notion of the voluntary is an essentially superficial notion that does important work on the condition that we do not try to metaphysically deepen it, and that attempts to deepen it illustrate a problematic tendency to warp our conception of the mind under pressure from moral aspirations.
history, justice, moral psychology, agency, responsibility, philosophy of action
Download PDFChoosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche
The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026
Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century
Download PDFLeft Wittgensteinianism
European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603
Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.
conceptual change, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, history, Bernard Williams, language games
Download PDFNietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (2): 341–63. 2021. doi:10.1515/agph-2018-0048
Based on various posthumous fragments, the article reconstructs Nietzsche’s little-known early genealogical account of how the value of truth and the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness originated not from a pure love of truth, but from the practical necessity of social cooperation.
genealogy, 19th century, Nietzsche, continental philosophy, truthfulness, social cooperation
Download PDFWhence the Demand for Ethical Theory?
American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2): 135–46. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.2307/48614001
Offers a practical derivation of the need for public and judicial reasoning to take a more discursive and consistent form than private deliberation (a theme more fully explored in ch. 10 of my second book).
public reason, ethical theory, genealogy, metaethics, legitimacy, conceptual change
Download PDFRevealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Social Functions in Philosophy: Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives. Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael Van Riel (eds.), 200–218. London: Routledge. 2020. doi:10.4324/9780429435393
This paper argues that state-of-nature stories, read as dynamic models rather than history, can reveal how key normative practices meet collective needs of coordination, conflict-management, and non-domination. Drawing on Hume’s genealogy of justice, Williams’s genealogy of truthfulness, and related work, it shows how concepts like property, knowledge, and testimonial justice underpin social cooperation and political legitimacy. In doing so, it offers social and political philosophers a way to explain both the persistence of ideas and institutions and the grounds on which they can be criticized.
coordination, genealogy, history, Hume, Nietzsche, political philosophy
Download PDFNietzsche as a Critic of Genealogical Debunking: Making Room for Naturalism without Subversion
The 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 PDFNietzsches affirmative Genealogien
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67 (3): 429–439. By invitation. 2019. doi:10.1515/dzph-2019-0034
Argues that alongside his well-known critical genealogies, Nietzsche also developed “affirmative genealogies” that are not historically situated. These genealogies investigate the “practical origins” of concepts like justice and truth, showing how they arise instrumentally from fundamental human needs. By presenting these concepts as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable, this approach offers an affirmative justification, which the author connects to Nietzsche’s later idea of an “economic justification of morality.”
genealogy, history, justice, morality, Nietzsche, truth
Download PDFDavidsonian Causalism and Wittgensteinian Anti-Causalism: A Rapprochement
Ergo 5 (6): 153–72. 2018. doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.006
Seeks a rapprochement in the longstanding debate between Davidsonian causalists and Wittgensteinian anti-causalists by arguing that both sides can agree that reasons are not causes, but that intentional explanations are causal explanations.
reasons vs. causes, action explanation, explanation, analytic philosophy, 20th century, interpretation
Download PDFWilliams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality
Philosophers’ 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
Download PDFDoes Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy
Studia Philosophica 76: 137–52. 2017. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2017.76008
Develops Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline.
historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, Williams
Download PDFTwo Orders of Things: Wittgenstein on Reasons and Causes
Philosophy 92 (3): 369–97. 2017. doi:10.1017/S0031819117000055
Situating Wittgenstein in the causalism/anti-causalism debate in the philosophy of mind, this paper argues that Wittgenstein’s arguments differ from those of his immediate successors; that he anticipates current anti-psychologistic trends; and that he is perhaps closer to Davidson than historical dialectics suggest.
action theory, action explanation, analytic philosophy, reasons vs. causes, philosophy of language, 20th century
Download PDFNietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice
British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 727–49. 2017. doi:10.1080/09608788.2016.1266462
Examines Nietzsche’s view that the ideal of justice is a contingent political development emerging only when parties of roughly equal power need a system of exchange and requital to avoid mutually assured destruction, meaning the applicability of norms of justice is originally tied to distributions of power. This perspective reframes justice as a human-made solution to the recurring problem of social order. Understanding these origins vindicates justice as an indispensable invention for social life.
genealogy, power, political philosophy, 19th century, justice, Nietzsche
Download PDFWittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons
Wittgenstein-Studien 7 (1): 105–30. 2016. doi:10.1515/witt-2016-0108
This article examines Wittgenstein’s conception of rationality through the central image of the “chain,” arguing that reasons are defined by their relational role in making actions intelligible rather than by intrinsic properties. The author contends that unlike chains of causes, chains of reasons are necessarily finite and anchored in communal reason-giving practices, meaning that justification inevitably ends at the boundaries of a specific language game. Ultimately, the paper suggests that this finite structure liberates agents from the misleading expectation of infinite justification while simultaneously limiting the reach of reasons to the specific practices that sustain them.
action theory, Wittgenstein, reasons and causes, philosophy of mind, explanation, justification
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