Research
Publications
Ratcliffe, Julian. 2024. ‘Genealogy: A Conceptual Map’. European Journal of Philosophy 32 (4): 1255–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12949.
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 Alienation’.
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.
‘The Metasemantics Political Philosophy Needs’.
Abstract: Linguistic analysis typically proceeds by first setting up a language and then determining rules for pairing sentences of the language with truth-values (Stalnaker 1970). On this picture, linguistic activity is comprised of two components: a semantic stage at which the meanings of our terms are defined and an epistemic stage at which we apply those terms to the world in belief and judgement. For Carnap, this means that the theorist is free to construct a language as they wish at the semantic stage so long as the beliefs and judgements formed in its terms are true (Carnap 1952).
This two-stage metasemantic framework seems to offer a useful means of approaching the analysis and amelioration of unjust linguistic practices. For if linguistic practice can be analysed into semantic and epistemic components, then we can fruitfully examine how the choices made at the semantic stage condition which beliefs and judgements can be formed at the epistemic stage. Indeed, as recent work on the ethics of conceptualisation (Queloz 2025), propagandistic language (Stanley 2015), and philosophy as a tool of critique (Haslanger 2014) has shown, the concepts with which we navigate the social world play a central role in structuring what we believe about it. The upshot of this view is that we can ameliorate our politics by ameliorating our language.
I argue, however, that this view is mistaken. For while assuming a two-stage metasemantic framework may appear to facilitate analysis of how semantic decisions come to bear on politically salient belief, it in fact restricts us to doing philosophy about politics rather than doing philosophy politically. This is because in order to conduct analysis at the epistemic stage, accounts that assume a two-stage metasemantic framework must regard the decisions made at the semantic stage as fixed. This means that linguistic analysis risks becoming disconnected from the political contexts in which our linguistic practices figure. Genuinely political philosophy instead requires adopting a one-stage metasemantic framework.
A one-stage metasemantic framework views the semantic and epistemic components of linguistic practice as essentially interrelated. On this view, the meanings of our terms are determined in the rough and tumble of figuring out what we take to be true in belief and judgement, and we believe and judge as we do in light of the meanings of our terms (Davidson 1973). Analysing unjust linguistic practices thus involves analysis of the concrete circumstances in which they feature and ameliorating unjust linguistic practices consists in redescribing the social world in and through the process of forming beliefs about it.
My talk will examine the political implications of one- and two-stage metasemantic frameworks. I shall first outline the explanatory structure of two-stage metasemantic frameworks. I shall then argue that two-stage metasemantic strategies hinder politically informed linguistic analysis by developing a distinction between doing philosophy about politics and doing philosophy politically. Finally, I shall examine the political benefits of assuming a one-stage metasemantic strategy. I shall conclude with a brief discussion of the distinction between normative political philosophy and critical theory.
‘Irrelevant Influences and Contingent Belief’.
Disambiguation of a commonly conflated distinction in the literature on the genealogy of belief.
Selected talks
‘Conceptual Agency’. Handout.
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
‘The Metasemantics Political Philosophy Needs’. Handout.
2025. Crossroads in the Political Philosophy of Language | University of Valencia
‘Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Nietzsche? Genealogy, Higher-Order Evidence, and Rule-Following’. Handout.
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.