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The Contingent World

A ‘critical genealogy’ is an account of the origins of some thing of contemporary significance – a widespread belief, institution, practice, value, concept – put forward with the purpose of unseating or discrediting that thing. These lectures will think about critical genealogy in some of its historical, epistemological and political dimensions.

Lecture I: Genealogy and the Ancients

While the practice of critical genealogy is most associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, it also played an important role in the development of pre-Platonic Greek thought. Telling that history involves the examination of several intellectual currents: the creation of new cosmologies and hypothetical pre-histories of human civilisation by the Ionian natural philosophers; the development of eliminativist metaphysics by the poet-philosophers of Magna Graecia; the burgeoning interest in cultural variation and contingency among the histores; the Sophists’ development of a distinction between nomos (convention) and phusis (nature); and the Athenian experiment with democracy.

Lecture II: Genealogy and the Epistemic Question

The relationship between analytic philosophy and critical genealogy is one of ambivalence. Analytic philosophy has its origins in the rejection of psychologism, idealism and historicism – three genealogical modes of thought. And yet in the last forty years or so, analytic philosophers have become increasingly in thrall to critical genealogy, attempting to genealogically debunk various targets including morality, theism, commonsense ontology and analytic philosophy itself. Why this shift? And when, if ever, does a genealogy in fact impugn the epistemic credentials of what it explains?

Lecture III: Genealogy as Critique

Intellectuals have seen genealogy as a means towards social transformation. For genealogical thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, the goal is not simply to explain how our beliefs, values and concepts have developed, but to liberate us in relation to them. How is this supposed to work? In particular, can critical genealogy exercise liberatory force without essentially resting on a claim of epistemological debunking? And can it do so without suffering from a fatal ‘normativity problem’? In this respect, is critical genealogy fated to be the poor relation of immanent critique?