I’m a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where I work on conceptual ethics and the ideal of systematic thought as applied to public administration and AI thanks to an Ambizione Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (running until 2027). Before that, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and a Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford for three years. In 2022, I received the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel for my first book as well as the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers of the Lauener Foundation for Analytical Philosophy.

While most of my earlier research has been in metaphilosophy, epistemology, the theory of action, and the history of philosophy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (especially Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Bernard Williams), my more recent work has tended to be in ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.

My first book, entitled The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, was published open access by Oxford University Press and can be downloaded for free here. An essay in Aeon offers an accessible introduction to some of the book’s main themes. Hardback copies can be ordered with a discount by accessing the OUP store through the image below. My second book, Reasons for Reasons: An Essay in Conceptual Ethics, is currently under review at Oxford University Press.

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:

PhilPeople ∙ Google Scholar ∙ Academia.edu ∙ OrcID