Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

"The book should immediately become a staple in the library of anyone with an interest in contemporary English-language philosophy. The collection contains many excellent essays that have been hard to locate for a while, or which have not been previously published. The title essay,'Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,' is a rich and remarkable essay, and this is a splendid collection."—Richard Moran, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, author of Authority and Estrangement (Princeton)

"Bernard Williams brought human life into philosophy, and so into the philosophy of all of us. No one outdid him in his mastery of those abstract complexities without which no real philosophy is possible. But through all the intricate reasonings his eye was always on what counts most: making the best sense of the lives of human beings."—Barry Stroud, University of California at Berkeley

"Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the late twentieth century, who managed to combine an extraordinary philosophical command with an equally impressive gift for keeping in touch with the deepest issues of human life. These essays take up questions about practical reason, the will to believe, and the relation between belief and other mental states, whose modern discussion was transformed by the power and originality of his contributions. Central to all his work is a resistance to what might be called the scientism of much analytical philosophy, something that Williams always stood against in the spheres of ethics and politics."—Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University, and author of The Ethics of Identity (Princeton)

Choice

Editor A.W. Moore . . . has certainly done the scholarly world a service. . . . Williams is a virtuoso practitioner and questioner of philosophy. His task is both positive and negative: positive in that he seeks to carve out a place for distinctively philosophical contributions to human knowledge and well-being (where these contributions are indeed peculiarly philosophical and not scientific), and negative in that he is concerned with the limited nature of these contributions.

Bernard Williams was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University (1967-1979), Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley (1988-2003), and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University (1990-1996), and was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford until his death in 2003. A. W. Moore is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and the author of "The Infinite, Points of View," and "Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty".