Research

Publications

Under review

  • ‘Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Nietzsche? Genealogy, Higher-Order Evidence, and Rule-Following’. Philosophical Studies.

    • Abstract: The aetiologies of our beliefs, concepts, and values seem – in at least some cases – to come to bear on the reasons we have for endorsing them. Indeed, if it turns out I hold liberal values just because I was raised in a liberal household, then I seem to have reason to review them. Yet this may prompt a distinctive kind of philosophical unease. For whether I ought to endorse a belief, concept, or value is just a matter of its truth, aptness, and value respectively. If it turns out that I believe, conceptualise, and value simply because of contingent historical factors, then something, somewhere has gone awry.

      Amia Srinivasan calls this unease genealogical anxiety. Yet some might find it quite strange. For in many normal cases, the fact that our beliefs, concepts, and values vary with the contingencies of history is an indication that they are appropriately sensitive to what the world is like. So, what exactly do some find anxiety-inducing? What are we supposed to be genealogically anxious about?

      I argue that there are three candidates for what might prompt genealogical anxiety: cultural relativism, epistemological scepticism, and normative nihilism. I then argue that understanding genealogical anxiety as a worry about either cultural relativism or epistemological scepticism leads to debilitating problems. Understanding it as a worry about normative nihilism, however, raises a problem that strikes at the heart of a very general way of thinking about discursive normativity: the rule-following paradox. Genealogical anxiety thus warrants urgent philosophical attention.

Works in progress

  • ‘Conceptual Agency’.

    • Abstract: It is a basic feature of our epistemic and discursive lives that we do not always choose the concepts with which we describe the world. I did not, for instance, choose to describe the world in terms of democracy, consumerism, and scientific consensus any more than a Medieval pauper would have chosen to describe it in terms of heresy, salvation, and piety. Rather, I inherited my concepts from the particular cultural formation in which I find myself just as the pauper inherited hers. However, since the intentional actions that agents can perform depend, as Anscombe famously puts it, on their being recognised “under some description”, this means that our possibilities for intentional action depend on the possibilities of description our conceptual repertoires make available to us, possibilities in large part beyond our control. That what we can intentionally do is so constrained duly suggests that we are in some sense unfree.

      The objective of my talk is to explore just how we ought to understand this kind of unfreedom. To do so, I shall argue that the contingency of our inherited concepts threatens to undermine their normative authority. I shall then argue that Korsgaard’s metanormative constructivism offers a compelling if incomplete response to this problem. Finally, I shall argue that appropriately supplementing Korsgaard’s picture means that we ought to understand the unfreedom that emerges on Anscombe’s picture of intentionality as a form of alienation, the amelioration of which requires modifying the parts of the world to which they are ascribed.

  • ‘Irrelevant Influences and Contingent Belief’.

    • Disambiguation of a commonly conflated distinction in the literature on the genealogy of belief.

Selected talks

  • ‘Conceptual Agency’.

    • 2026. Philosophical Society of Southern Africa Annual Conference | University of Cape Town

    • 2025. Conceptual Dogmatism: Epistemology and Ethics of Consciousness-Raising Workshop | University of Vienna

      • Handout available here.

  • ‘Doing Philosophy Politically’.

    • 2025. Crossroads in the Political Philosophy of Language | University of Valencia

  • ‘Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Nietzsche? Genealogy, Higher-Order Evidence, and Rule-Following’.

    • 2025. Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar | University of Oxford

  • ‘Towards a Critical Pragmatics: Power, Exclusion, and Genealogical Anxiety’.

    • 2024. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

  • ‘Four Kinds of Genealogy’.

    • 2023. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

  • ‘Forgiveness without Contrition: Brandom’s Critique of Genealogy’.

    • 2022. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

  • ‘Race and Racism in Kant’s Moral Theory’.

    • 2019. KCL Minorities and Philosophy Conference | King’s College London

  • ‘Reasonable Pluralism and the Problem of Difference’.

    • 2016. UCL Philosophy Society Undergraduate Conference | University College London

Unpublished work

  • Ratcliffe, Julian. 2018. ‘Beyond Ideology: Marx, Critique, and the Production of Social Reality’. MPhilStud Thesis. Department of Philosophy, King’s College London. Available upon request.