Bernard Arthur Owen Williams

A. W. Moore

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophyis widely acknowledged to be Bernard Williams' most important book and a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Delivering a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onward, Williams reorients ethical theory towards "truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life." He explores and reflects on the thorniest problems in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition includes a new commentary on the text by A.W.Moore, St.Hugh's College, Oxford. By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. He taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford. He is the author of Morality; Utilitarianism: For andAgainst; Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Truth and Truthfulness.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. Shame and Necessity gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world.

Shame and Necessity

Bernard Williams

This collection of historical essays range from the 6th century BC to the 20th century AD, from Homer to Collingwood by way of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Nietzsche. This is the history of philosophy written philosophically. Insights into the past counteract blind acceptance of present assumptions.

Essays in the History of Philosophy

The Sense of the Past

Joseph Raz

Christine Marion Korsgaard

Robert B. Pippin

The Practice of Value

Amartya Sen

Utilitarianism considered both as a theory of personal morality and a theory of public choice.

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams

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