Abstract. — According to Mary Midgley (1919–2018), philosophy is like plumbing: “Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole”. In her view, philosophy responds to basic needs that are fundamental to human social life. Our political and social institutions have philosophical concepts at their basis, and a well-ordered society requires philosophical concepts that are up to the task of helping us devise right ways of living together. Melioristic projects in philosophy attempt to fix or reroute this plumbing, but because our philosophical concepts are invisible and because we are so familiar with them, conceptual engineering is difficult. Philosophical genealogies aim to overcome this limit to our imagination by looking at how our current concepts originated. This paper will discuss philosophical concepts developed in hunter-gatherer communities as a source of inspiration for melioristic philosophy and conceptual engineering. We ought not treat contemporary hunter-gatherers as proxies of stages of human evolution. Rather, examining the philosophical ideas of hunter-gatherers is useful because it gives us a better idea of the range of human ethical, political, metaphysical ideas. Members of large-scale societies do not get a clear view of this range, because living in large groups presents its own constraints and challenges, which in turn limits the philosophical options. I will argue that features of hunter-gatherer philosophies, such as egalitarianism and care for one’s natural environment are not inevitable byproducts of hunter-gatherer life, but rather, sophisticated philosophical ideas, and hunter-gatherer societies, past and present, are philosophical peers to our present-day large-scale societies. I close by considering the role of academic philosophers in the light of this.

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