I’m a Privatdozent at the University of Bern and an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Before that, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford for three years. In 2022, I was awarded the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel as well as the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers of the Lauener Foundation for Analytical Philosophy.
I work at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and language with moral and political philosophy. My work is also deeply informed by the history of philosophy and genealogical methods in philosophy. I have advocated the relevance of historical perspectives to contemporary philosophy in a number of contexts, and done exegetical work on Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Ryle, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, P. F. Strawson, Donald Davidson, Ronald Dworkin, and Bernard Williams.
My most recent book, The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need, just appeared open access with Oxford University Press. The question at the heart of the book is why we should accept a given conceptualization or definition—a question that has a rich history in philosophy, but that also arises in science and politics. To answer this question, the 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. The book can also be accessed on Oxford Academic here.
My previous book, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, was published open access by Oxford University Press in 2021 and can be downloaded for free here. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of telling partly fictional, partly historical genealogical narratives with a view to exploring what might have driven us to develop some of our most abstract and seemingly idle ideas. It is shown how this tradition cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. An essay in Aeon offers an accessible introduction to some of the book’s main themes. You can also hear me give a talk on the book to the Moral Sciences Club of the University of Cambridge here. Hardback copies can be ordered with a 30% discount by accessing the OUP store through the link in the cover image.
My last name is pronounced with a silent ‘z’, i.e. [ kəˈloː ]. I can be reached by email at matthieu.queloz@unibe.ch. You can also find me in the following places:
