Bernard Williams

July 24, 2019

This website will be one I keep returning to.  It gathers together a great deal of work by and about Bernard Williams, a major anglophone philosopher of the twentieth century.

"Analytic philosophy" has a somewhat sketchy reputation to people who aren't analytic philosophers, and one can admit, many analytic philosophers don't try very hard to make themselves loved by other scholars or other human beings, for that matter.  (This book by the cultural sociologist Michèle Lamont gives a nice picture of why and how--if anyone's busy writing an academic novel, I'd strongly recommend this book to them.  Also anyone who's going to become a Dean or administrator.)  But it has a great deal of intellectual power, and it has the very worthwhile virtue, to borrow from what our elementary school math teachers used to say, of always trying its uttermost to show its work--that is, making as explicit as possible the steps in its reasoning, making its arguments transparent.  The idea seems to be that anyone can pick up a book of analytic philosophy and, with only common sense and hard thinking, get through it.  (Stanley Cavell, trained in this tradition, once said that "analytic philosophy begins from the conceit of having read nothing, while continental philosophy begins from the conceit of having read everything," and that seems a useful first approximation of some of the differences.)  This has its weaknesses, but it has great virtues, most of all clarity.

I have been a big fan of people centrally located in this tradition, as well as some who were trained in it but went on to see some of its limitations.  For my purposes the most interesting are those who work in moral philosophy or philosophical anthropology, broadly.  Scholars such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, Samuel Scheffler, Jonathan Lear, Stephen Darwall, Candace Vogler, and others.  Many of these grasp the virtues of their discipline, but see its limitations too, and try to reach beyond or counteract those limitations.  Often they do so by bringing in other approaches to humanity--Murdoch famously engaged French existentialism and literature (and was a novelist too), Lear is a psychoanalyst, others are just engaged with thinkers resolutely outside the ambit of analytic philosophy (ancient Greek or Christian thinkers, most frequently).

Of all these thinkers Bernard Williams stands out to my mind for the most wide-ranging of humanistic minds.  Murdoch was just as humanistic, and perhaps (to me) a little deeper; Anscombe just as acute philosophically; McDowell at least as profound (following on Murdoch, in a way), etc..  But Williams was always broader, and more fully (or at least more explicitly) embedded in the human conversation, than anyone else.  He was in this way the heir of Isaiah Berlin, though perhaps without Berlin's paralyzing self-consciousness as a scholar.  (No one who knew Williams ever reported him hampered by an excessive humility.)

To my mind, and I suspect to Williams's, he was the inheritor of a certain Nietzschean sensibility, perhaps the most self-conscious inheritor of it in twentieth century philosophy.  There were others who were more voluble about their descent from Nietzsche--Foucault, for example--but Williams learned a profound lesson from Nietzsche that no one else was positioned to acquire.  It was not the only Nietzschean sensibility to inherit, but it was a central one.  Williams took from Nietzsche a deep sense that the "classical heritage" is mis-aligned with the values and worldview we have inherited from our more proximate ancestors, and that we misunderstand ancient thought and art because of that.  This misunderstanding damages our self-understanding, and crimps our apprehensions of the scope of true human possibility.  (I read Foucault, for instance, as only realizing this at the end of his life, in his work on The History of Sexuality.  Foucault has become the master-thinker of humanistic higher education these days, and for all his insight, not in an entirely positive way; engaging Williams could help.)  

His book Shame and Necessity explores this intuition in ways more powerfully than anyone since Nietzsche himself.  I recommend you read it.

Below is a piece I wrote on Williams and others twenty-five years ago, urging people in my field--Christian theology and religious ethics--to read him.  I think it's pretty apprehensible to people not trained in those fields, however.