Genealogies of Construal: Western Philosophy and the Becoming of Possibility

To trace the history of Western philosophy is not simply to recount a sequence of doctrines or the intellectual legacy of great thinkers. It is to follow a shifting horizon of possibility: to see how, in different epochs, the very conditions of construal were cut, reframed, and realigned. Each philosophical turn did not merely describe reality; it opened and foreclosed the ways in which reality could be construed at all.

This series approaches philosophy genealogically, not representationally. From the pre-Socratics to the 21st century, we follow the movements by which possibility was structured: how myth was transformed into logos; how ideality and actuality were divided and systematised; how divinity became the ground of order; how modern thought split subject from object; how reason and history reconfigured the space of potential; how language, difference, and relation came to define the very act of construal.

The aim is not to rehearse canonical interpretations but to uncover the successive architectures of construal that philosophy itself instituted. Each stage will be examined as a decisive reorganisation of possibility, an inflection in the becoming of thought. In this way, the series situates Western philosophy not as a cumulative body of knowledge but as a genealogy of construals through which worlds have been cut, inhabited, and surpassed.

By the end, the trajectory comes to our own moment, in which relational and perspectival ontologies emerge not as novel inventions but as the latest configuration of possibility itself: an opening in which construal recognises its reflexive role in the becoming of reality.

This is the terrain of our inquiry: philosophy as construal, construal as the shaping of possibility, and possibility as one of the deep currents in the becoming of worlds.