Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams (born September 21, 1929, Westcliff, Essex, England—died June 10, 2003, Rome, Italy) English philosopher, noted especially for his writings on ethics and the history of Western philosophy, both ancient and modern.

Williams was educated at Chigwell School, Essex, and Balliol College, Oxford. During the 1950s he served in the Royal Air Force (1951–53) and was a fellow of All Souls College and New College, Oxford. He was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 1967 and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1979. He was Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1988 to 2003 and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1990 to 1996.

In 1955 Williams married Shirley Catlin, who, as Shirley Williams, became a prominent political figure in Britain; in 1993 she was created Baroness Williams of Crosby. In 1974 the marriage was dissolved, and Williams married Patricia Skinner. Williams headed or served on a number of public commissions, notably the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (1977–79), and was a director of the English National Opera. He was knighted in 1999.

Philosophy as a humanistic discipline

Williams was trained in classics and wrote memorably about Plato, Aristotle, and Greek moral consciousness, but he was also one of the most prolific and versatile philosophers of his time. His published works include writings on René Descartes (1596–1650), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and important papers and books on personal identity, the relation of morality to human motivation, the idea of social and political equality, the nature and value of truth, the significance of death, and the role and limits of objectivity in science, morality, and human life. He did not put forward a systematic philosophical theory; indeed, he was suspicious of systematic theories, particularly in ethics, because, in his view, they failed to be true to the contingency, complexity, and individuality of human life.

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Williams was recognized for his brilliance even as an undergraduate. He was trained in philosophy when Oxford was home to the new movement of linguistic analysis, or ordinary language philosophy, led by J.L. Austin, but the breadth of his cultural, historical, and political interests kept him from becoming an adherent of that school. He met its standards of clarity of expression and rigour in argument, but his aims in philosophy went far beyond conceptual analysis (see analytic philosophy). He regarded philosophy as an effort to achieve a deeper understanding of human life and the human point of view in its multiple dimensions. For the same reasons, he also resisted the tendency to regard scientific knowledge as the model of understanding to which philosophy should aspire at a more abstract level—a tendency that was strengthened during his lifetime by the growing influence of the American philosopher W.V.O. Quine and by a shift in the centre of gravity of English-language philosophy from Britain to the United States. Williams held that physical science could aspire to an objectivity and universality that did not make sense for humanistic subjects, and his greatest influence came from his challenge to the ambition of universality and objectivity in ethics, especially as expressed in utilitarianism but also in the tradition established by Immanuel Kant.

The absolute conception of reality

In his book Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), Williams gave a compelling description of the ideal of objectivity in science, which he called the “absolute conception” of reality. According to this conception, different human perspectives on and representations of the world are the product of interaction between human beings, as constituents of the world, and the world itself as an independently existing reality. Humans cannot apprehend the world except by some form of perception or representation; yet they can recognize, and to some extent identify and try to compensate for, the distortions or limitations that their own point of view and their relation to the rest of reality introduce. The aim of objectivity in science is by this method to approach as closely as possible to the absolute conception—a conception of what is there “anyway,” independent of the human point of view. Historical self-consciousness about the contingent elements in this process is compatible with the idea of a single truth toward which humans are trying to make progress.

Williams was cognizant of the doubts that exist regarding whether this ideal is intelligible, let alone attainable, in light of the fact that human thinking must start from some particular historical moment and must use the contingent biological faculties and cultural tools that happen to be at hand. But whatever may be the difficulties in pursuing this ideal, he believed that it makes sense as an ambition. If there is a way things are anyway, then it makes sense to want to know what that way is and to explain the nature of human perceptions in terms of it.