Bernard Williams As A Philosopher of Ethical Freedom (original) (raw)
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TOPOI, 2024
Bernard Williams’s contributions to philosophy are rich and manifold – including metaphysics, moral or political philosophy – and his interests in the history of philosophy range from classical antiquity to the more technical subtleties of contemporary analytic philosophy. Therefore, it is not easy to fit him into a single philosophical tradition, for he never looked at philosophical problems from the entrenched viewpoint of a narrow perspective. He devoted himself to the study of the most diverse problems and authors – including Descartes, Nietzsche, Homer, or the Greek tragedians – always from unusual and original angles. This is, first and foremost, the signature of his thought; and now, almost twenty years after his death, it is still this originality and relentless ability to produce fresh insights that we are intent on paying homage to.
'Minding the Gap: Bernard Williams and David Hume on Living An Ethical Life'
Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2013
Bernard Williams is frequently supposed to be an ethical Humean, due especially to his work on ‘internal’ reasons. In fact Williams’s work after his famous article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ constitutes a profound shift away from Hume’s ethical outlook. Whereas Hume offered a reconciling project whereby our ethical practices could be self-validating without reference to external justificatory foundations, Williams’s later work was increasingly skeptical of any such possibility. I conclude by suggesting reasons for thinking Williams was correct, a finding which should be of concern for anybody engaged in the study of ethics.
Review of Ethics Beyond the Limits (in: Mind)
Mind
Bernard Williams’ books demand an unusual amount of work from readers. This is particularly true of his 1985 magnum opus, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy—a work so charged with ideas that there seems to be nothing more to say, and yet at the same time so pared-down and tersely argued that there seems to be nothing left to take away. Reflecting on the book five years after its publication, Williams writes that it is centrally concerned with a Nietzschean question: the question of philosophy’s authority, in particular when it comes to telling us how to live. Some ethical theories seem implicitly committed to the idea that philosophy has everything to tell us about how to live. This Williams rejects. But the question then is how much philosophy has to tell us, and as critical as Williams may be of philosophy’s ambitions in this regard, his answer is certainly not nothing. The book even suggests some things that philosophy might say. But what Williams emphatically insists on, both in the book and in his later reflection on it, is that the question needs to be taken more seriously than it has been.
Bernard Williams on Moral Knowledge
Universities Quarterly, 1986
This brief review essay argues against the late Bernard Williams' doubts, in his "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy" (1985), concerning the ability of "hypertraditional" morality, founded upon "thick" moral concepts, to withstand familiar kinds of philosophical scepticism.
'How Should One Live?' : Williams on Practical Deliberation and Reasons for Acting
Logos and Life: Essays on Mind, Action, Language and Ethicsand , 2022
Two interrelated theses propounded by Williams are, first, the claim that practical deliberation is ‘radically first-personal’, and second, the claim that a person has reason to φ only insofar as φ-ing connects appropriately with his ‘motivational set’. I criticise each of these claims in turn. Practical deliberation can yield conclusions about what another person should (or must) do, and it is part of practical rationality to be able to accept such conclusions as applied to oneself, sometimes on the authority of another. As to the second claim, the key argument given for it in Williams’ ‘Internal and External Reasons’ turns out to rest on a dubious causalism about intentional action, as well as on a general principle that fails to hold even of efficient causation, viz. ‘If it could be the case that p without X’s φ-ing, then in the case where X does φ the fact that p can’t by itself explain why X φs’. The failure of the two interconnected claims vitiates the argument of chapter three of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, in which Williams criticises philosophical attempts (e.g. Aristotle’s) to locate the foundations of ethics in notions of human well-being.