Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London
About Me
I am Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at UCL in February 2026, where my research was funded by the AHRC through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. My work argues that political philosophy cannot do without history — not merely as a check on the fact-sensitivity of normative theories, but as partly constitutive of political understanding itself. My first publication on this topic appeared in Ergo in 2025.
More broadly, I am interested in moral and political philosophy, epistemology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history.
In the summer of 2023, I was a visiting scholar at Yale University. Previously, I spent a year as an interdisciplinary scholar at the UCL History Department, funded by the UCL Research Excellence Scholarship for Cross-Disciplinary Training. Before that, I did my MPhil Stud in Philosophy at UCL, and my BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy with a specialisation in logic at the University of Warwick.
I am originally from Brazil, although I lived in Italy for four years before coming to the UK as an undergraduate. I enjoy pairing philosophy with ever-new forms of exercise. To date, I have enjoyed it alongside judo, rock-climbing, yoga, and swimming. I usually find it helpful to pick those exercises where there are good safety reasons to not let my thoughts drift back to my work. I live in London with my partner and our two cats.
My Research
History in Political Philosophy:
Refutation and Imagination
(Ergo: An Open Access Philosophy Journal, 2025)
Political philosophy is often treated as a discipline that can proceed without detailed engagement with intellectual history — historical research matters only insofar as it ensures a theory’s sensitivity to social facts. This paper argues for a more substantial role. I show that historical inquiry also serves as a source of imaginative resources: by expanding the range of political possibilities we can seriously entertain, it guards against a form of epistemic failure I call ‘imaginative failure’ — the inability to recognise political alternatives not because we have considered and rejected them, but because our inherited categories make them invisible.
Historical Essences and Political Theory
(In Progress)
Historical essences are essences that are partly constituted by historical properties. That is, properties that cannot be understood without knowing about the object’s history. In this essay, I argue against the common assumption that the central objects of political theory do not possess historical essences.
Paper on Political Realism and Reasons Internalism
(Under Review, Title Redacted)
Political realism is widely characterised as the thesis that political normativity is irreducible to moral normativity. This paper argues the characterisation misses what is philosophically at stake. What divides Williams and Geuss from their opponents is not the source of political normativity but its form: whether political justification can be modelled on externalist accounts of reasons that treat reasons as binding independently of what historically situated agents could be brought to recognise. On the reading I defend, Williams’s internalism about reasons is not a commitment held alongside his realism but its philosophical foundation. Recovering that connection reframes the realist challenge — making it a substantive objection to the picture of justification on which much analytic political philosophy tacitly depends, rather than the cheap scepticism with which it has become associated.
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My work argues that political philosophy cannot do without history — not merely as a check on fact-sensitivity, but as partly constitutive of political understanding itself.
The project develops this across two strands: one examining the epistemic vulnerabilities created when theorists lack historical fluency, and one arguing that some central political concepts historical essences intelligible only through the trajectories of their development.
A running thread applies these conclusions to political realism, reframing the stakes of Bernard Williams’s and Raymond Geuss’s critique of mainstream analytic political philosophy.
Paper on History, Epistemic Perspectives and Political Philosophy
(Under Review, Title Redacted)
The most natural defence of historical inquiry’s importance for political philosophy holds that it supplies the facts needed to make normative theory sufficiently sensitive to social reality. This paper argues that defence sells historical inquiry short. Drawing on the work of Mills, Skinner, Geuss, and Williams, I argue that the primary epistemic function of historical inquiry is to prompt perspectival shifts — recalibrations in how philosophers interpret and evaluate their subjects. Without historical fluency, political philosophers embed oversimplified assumptions inherited from past frameworks but rarely scrutinised. The distinctiveness of this contribution is best captured by viewing historical inquiry as a form of hermeneutical inquiry, which contrasts with the verdictive mode of theorising dominant in analytic political philosophy and cannot be replaced by it.
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Genealogy Workshops
My MPhil thesis was about genealogical methods in philosophical inquiry. Based on that research, I hosted a workshop on “The Role of Genealogical Inquiry in Moral, Social and Political Philosophy” at MANCEPT 2023.
Previously, I led a panel discussion on “Genealogy in Political Philosophy: Methods, Applications and Problems” at British and Irish Association of Political Theory conference, held at the University of Oxford in 2022.
Contact me if you are interested in developing other events in this area.
Victor Braga Weber 