E. J. Craig
4 writings
The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001
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, 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.
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From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy
Mind 129 (515): 683–714. 2020. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy083
Why would philosophers interested in the points or functions of our conceptual practices bother with genealogical explanations if they can focus directly on paradigmatic examples of the practices we now have? This paper offers three reasons why the genealogical approach earns its keep and formulates criteria for determining when it is called for.
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How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons
Synthese 197 (5): 2005–2027. 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9
Attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something are often said to commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems.
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Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?
The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 100–120. 2019. doi:10.1093/pq/pqy041
Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology holds that the concept of knowledge is primitive and explanatorily fundamental. This seems to leave little room for attempts to give a genealogical explanation of the concept of knowledge, much less ones that explain the formation of the concept of knowledge in terms of the concept of belief, as E.J. Craig does. Yet I argue that Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge not only is compatible with knowledge-first epistemology, but actually lends succour to it.
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