Philosophical Genealogy: A User's Guide

In what way might our past effect our current philosophical outlook? More particularly, is there any philosophical value in investigating the contexts from which our philosophical outlooks originate? Analytic philosophy has historically responded antagonistically to the suggestion that looking to our past for answers is valuable. Yet some philosophers argue that the search for the origins of our philosophical outlook can be a source of great (meta-)philosophical insight. One such strand are the so-called genealogists. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what the promise of philosophical genealogy is, and whether it can be fulfilled. A challenge for my project is that the term ‘genealogy’ has been used to describe very different kinds of things (Section I). As such, I propose to develop a taxonomy of conceptions of genealogy (Section II), identify what the distinctive features of its members are (Section III), and what kind of insight they can give us (Section IV). In the final section (Section V), I return to the question of whether there is any non-trivial claim we can make about what features are shared by the disparate conceptions I identify. I argue that there is, but not at the level of a common philosophical method. This is illustrated by the fact that each conception possesses a distinct object of study, methodology, and explanatory aim, and that each conception provides a different argument for the relevance of investigating the contingent contexts from which our philosophical outlooks originate. Nonetheless, I claim that the three conceptions share a common question—‘to what extent should we be concerned that our current outlook is dependent upon contingent features about our past?’—and that each conception should be understood as offering both a different interpretation of this question, and a distinctive set of tools with which to address it.