Practical Origins of Ideas
Regular price
€105.99
A01=J. Robert G. Williams
A01=Matthieu Queloz
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_J. Robert G. Williams
Author_Matthieu Queloz
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HP
Category=HPK
Category=HPM
Category=QD
Category=QDTK
Category=QDTM
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780198868705
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 160 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 04 Mar 2021
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
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? In The Practical Origins of Ideas Matthieu Queloz 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, this 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.
Matthieu Queloz is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Before that, he completed a PhD at the University of Basel and an MA at the University of Zurich. His articles have appeared in journals such as Mind, Philosophers' Imprint, The Philosophical Quarterly, and Synthese. He received the 2020 Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers.
