Bernard Williams 1929 – 2003

Bernard Williams was a British analytic philosopher and one of the most original and influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Holding chairs at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford, he criticized the dominant utilitarian and Kantian traditions for their abstraction from the real lives and characters of moral agents, developing instead a rich analysis of the role of integrity, moral luck, and internal reasons in ethical life. His Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness combine analytic rigor with a deep sensitivity to the history of thought.

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born at Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex in September 1929, the only child of a civil servant. He read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, took his bachelor's in 1951, and after eighteen months in the Royal Air Force as a pilot held a fellowship at All Souls. He taught at New College Oxford, University College London, Bedford College, and from 1967 to 1979 was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge before being elected Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in 1979. From 1988 he held the Sather Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1990 to 1996 the White's Chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. He was knighted in 1999.

His books include Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), Problems of the Self (1973), Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), Moral Luck (1981), the central Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), Truth and Truthfulness (2002), and the posthumous In the Beginning Was the Deed (2005).

Williams launched some of the most penetrating critiques of utilitarianism and Kantian impartialism in twentieth-century ethics, defending the role of integrity, internal reasons, moral luck, and the irreducible particularity of agents; his late writings revived ancient Greek ethical thought and articulated a 'political realism' against moralised theories of politics. He died at Rome in June 2003 of complications from cancer.