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. (shrink)

Pragmatic Genealogy involves constructing fictional, quasi-historical models in order to discover what might explain and justify our concepts, ideas or practices. It arguably originated with Hume, but its most prominent practitioners are Edward Craig, Bernard Williams and Mathieu Queloz. Its defenders allege that the method allows us to understand “what the concept does for us, what its role in our life might be” (Craig, 1990), and that this in turn can ground practical reasons to preserve or further a conceptual practice. (...) In this paper, I argue that none of this is true, and that only a turn to the actual recent history of such practices can reveal those sorts of practical reasons. (shrink)

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely (...) in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)

Against those who identify genealogy with reductive genealogical debunking or deny it any evaluative and action-guiding significance, I argue for the following three claims: that although genealogies, true to their Enlightenment origins, tend to trace the higher to the lower, they need not reduce the higher to the lower, but can elucidate the relation between them and put us in a position to think more realistically about both relata; that if we think of genealogy’s normative significance in terms of a (...) triadic model that includes the genealogy’s addressee, we can see that in tracing the higher to the lower, a genealogy can facilitate an evaluation of the higher element, and where the lower element is some important practical need rather than some sinister motive, the genealogy can even be vindicatory; and finally, that vindicatory genealogies can offer positive guidance on how to engineer better concepts. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Here is a sketch of a genealogy of political theory for the last century. This is a genealogy in Nietzsche’s sense: therefore, neither unhistorical taxonomy, nor a history of political theory as it is written by historians, but a typology in time. Four types of modern political theory are distinguished. These are called, with some justification, positive, normative, third way and sceptical political theory. Seen from the vantage of the twenty-first century, they form an instructive sequence, emerging as a series (...) of reactions to the canonical political theory that was established in the universities in the late nineteenth century. None of the four should be excluded from our conception of what political theory has been, though most of them, when seen genealogically, reveal their defects more clearly than they do when treated purely theoretically. Since this is a sceptical finding, the genealogy is a polemic against the first three types of modern political theory in favour of the last. (shrink)

In this essay an attempt is made to transcend the divide between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of history by proposing an alternative account of understanding the past, one based on the nature of testimonies, specifically theirscopeanddepth. This is done through a critical engagement with the works of prominent realist and anti-realist philosophers of history ; other philosophers working on relevant topics such as epistemology, and historians who have written on historical method. The alternative account thus developed is then (...) tested by applying it to the case of theHistorikerstreit, the bitterly waged historian's struggle concerning the history and legacy of Nazism. On the surface it appears to affirm the anti-realist position that posits historical narratives as being inherently normative/aesthetic given the inadequacies of the ‘thick’ realist position, but upon closer scrutiny it demonstrates the merit of my alternative, testimony-based ‘thin’ realist account. (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the genealogy of the modern state delivered by the author at the 2008 British Academy Lecture. It explains that to investigate the genealogy of the state is to discover that there has never been any agreed concept to which the word state has answered. The lecture suggests that any moral or political term that has become so deeply enmeshed in so many ideological disputes over such a long period of time is (...) bound to resist any efforts at definition. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In der soziologischen Diskussion spielen Begriff und Konzept der Inklusion – verstanden als umfassende Teilhabe aller Gesellschaftsmitglieder – aktuell eine große Rolle. Gleichzeitig gibt es eine entsprechende Konjunktur in den politischen, medialen und pädagogischen Diskursen. Über das Bildungssystem hinaus, wo Inklusion vor allem mit Blick auf die schulische Erziehung behinderter Kinder diskutiert wird, ist der Inklusionsgedanke auch in anderen Lebensbereichen, etwa im Sport oder Arbeitsleben, von Bedeutung. Insgesamt fällt auf, dass die soziologische Theorie und die gesellschaftliche Diskussion zwar lose (...) aufeinander verweisen, bisher jedoch kaum systematisch verbunden sind. Dabei ist von komplexen Wechselwirkungen zwischen den verschiedenen Diskursen auszugehen. In einem ersten Zugriff rekonstruiert der Beitrag den Inklusionsbegriff in genealogischer Perspektive, um dessen Umformungen und Umcodierungen sichtbar zu machen. Im zweiten Teil wird ein dispositivanalytischer Ansatz entwickelt, mit dessen Hilfe die Rationalitäten, Technologien, Institutionen und Subjektivierungen untersucht werden können, die Inklusion als ein hegemoniales Leitkonzept der Gegenwart formieren. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 444 - 464 Are genealogies of our beliefs relevant to the truth of these beliefs? Drawing on Bernard Williams’s _Truth and Truthfulness_, I argue that genealogies, or historical narratives showing how a set of beliefs came about, can be either critical or vindicatory of these beliefs. They can be critical by denaturalizing beliefs, showing their continued inability to solve explanatory problems, revealing the origins of these beliefs in assumptions that we no longer accept, (...) and exposing unwelcome practical applications of these beliefs. Genealogies can be vindicatory by showing that the framework of beliefs has the ability to innovate itself and has led to acceptable practical applications of the beliefs in question. However, if contingency creates the space for genealogies in philosophical arguments, it also limits their effectiveness. In most cases, genealogies do not offer conclusive arguments for or against the beliefs they narrate. They either point out a contradiction that needs to be resolved, or show that the framework of beliefs has been successful so far, with no guarantees for such success in the future. (shrink)

Excellence and frontier research have made inroads into European research policymaking and structure political agendas, funding programs and evaluation practices. The two concepts travelled a long way from the United States and have derived from contexts outside of science. Following their conceptual journey, we ask how excellence and frontier research have percolated into European science and higher education policies and how they have turned into lubricants of competition that buttress an ongoing reform process in Europe.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 67 Heft: 3 Seiten: 414-417.