Genealogy, Empirical History, and Functional Teleology

Abstract Growing interest in genealogy within analytical philosophy could bring a historical sensibility to a way of doing philosophy that has long been characterized as being ahistorical. Much of the recent interest in analytical genealogy takes its bearings from the work of Bernard Williams. Yet despite Williams’s frequent admonitions to respect the limits of philosophy, much new work in analytical genealogy seeks to put history into the service of philosophy, rather than understanding the two as distinctive and complementary forms of inquiry. Central to this mistake is a misunderstanding of the relation between the two forms of genealogy specified by Williams, namely fictional (or conjectural) genealogy and historical (or empirical) genealogy. One increasingly common view presents the two parts of Williams’s genealogy as a two-stage sequence in which the philosophical model-building of fictional genealogy comes first and historical genealogy is placed fully in its service. This view is mistaken twice over. Interpretatively, it does not square with Williams’s explicit claim that the contents of historical genealogy are often autonomous relative to those of fictional genealogy. Philosophically, it invokes an expansive form of functional explanation that seeks far too much from speculative modelling and leaves far too little for empirical history.