ABSTRACT
The mundane, commonsensical sense of genealogy is typically related to the idea of vindication, i.e., validation of one's authority and standing through the narrative of one's origins. Imaginary genealogies are arguably not particularly prominent within philosophy, but there are a few interesting examples, such as Aristophanes's myth of the origin of love as described in Plato's Symposium. The founding insight of the modern discipline of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is that history and philosophy have a special affinity and one can effectively advance both simultaneously. The relevance of the philosophical history of a concept for the analysis of its current instantiations relies crucially on the idea of the 'superimposition of layers of meaning'. The work of French philosopher Georges Canguilhem in the history and philosophy of medicine and biology provides thus a fruitful point of departure for the method of conceptual genealogy in the context of philosophical analysis.
