Introduction

Summary

At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the most influential philosophers in Anglo-American philosophy. His contribution to philosophy was very wide-ranging, from metaphysics and epistemology to moral, social, and political philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he made contributions to ancient philosophy, to scholarship on Descartes and to a wide range of other historical subjects. For the purposes of this volume, selection from this wide range of subjects was necessary and I opted to focus on the centre of gravity of Williams' work, moral philosophy. Furthermore, without any editorial intervention, the papers in the volume naturally clustered around the key themes of Williams' later writings from Shame and Necessity to Truth and Truthfulness, thus complementing a volume of papers on Williams' moral philosophy that focused on his earlier work.

Williams' early training both in classics and in the philosophical methods of Ryle and Austin inclined him to the piecemeal treatment of philosophical problems; he was not a systematic philosopher. However, over the course of his career, Williams did come to detect a broad consistency and mutual support between many of his distinctive theses in ethics. He remarked that “it is a reasonable demand that what one believes in one area of philosophy should make sense in terms of what one believes elsewhere. One's philosophical beliefs, or approaches, or arguments should hang together (like conspirators perhaps), but this demand falls a long way short of the unity promised by a philosophical system.”