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philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Suppose you believe something, say that the rich should donate a portion of their

wealth to the poor. Now you might believe this because you read it in a book or because

your parents taught it to you or you learned it in church or perhaps there's an evolutionary explanation

for your belief. Does it matter? We asked Amir Shrinivarsen what the origins of our beliefs are.

Amir Shrinovarsen, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you. We're going to focus on genealogy. Could you just say what that is?

A genealogy is a story or an account of the Genesis or origins of a thing or often a person.

So as we normally use the term in everyday conversation,

we mean by a genealogy someone's family ancestry,

your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents,

and so on.

But the term genealogy has a special philosophical meaning that was given to it by the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche.

So in 1887 he wrote this very famous book called On the Genealogy of Morals, in which he gives an account of the origins not of a particular person or a family, but instead of an entire system of belief which he calls Christian morality.

So it's a way of showing where something came from basically.

But you can do different things with genealogy. So for example you can use a

genealogical story to try and vindicate or justify something. Philosophers like

Locke and Hobbs and Rousseau tried to show that their ideal political arrangements

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