VII — Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking

Bibliographic Data

ID23348693
AuthorsAmia Srinivasan (St John’s College, University of Oxford, St Giles, Oxford, UK, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume119
Issue2
Pages127-156
Publication date2019-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueProceedings of the Aristotelian Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-7374 • E-ISSN: 1467-9264
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/arisoc/aoz009
OpenAlexW2955567140
LanguageEN
Citations received60
References cited64

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them.

Epistemology · Linguistics · Luck · Morality · Negation · Power (physics) · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

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