Bernard Williams Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Bernard Williams, organized by topic.
Browse Bernard Williams by topic
Bernard Williams on God
-
“Nietzsche ... did not settle for a demure civic conversation in the style of Richard Rorty's ironist , or saunter off with the smug nod that registers a deconstructive job neatly done. He was aware that his own criticisms and exposures owed both their motivation and their effect to the spirit of truthfulness. His aim was to see how far the values of truth could be revalued, how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source in the West up to now.”
p. 18
Bernard Williams on Justice
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Equality is widely accepted as a value, but it is unclear what equality demands.”
-
“Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional interpretations of those areas; they sense that it has something to do with truth; and (no doubt driven by the familiar desire to say something at once hugely general, deeply important, and reassuringly simple) they extend their worry to the notion of truth itself.”
p. 6
Bernard Williams on Knowledge
-
“p. 1; Chapter 1: The problem”
Wikiquote -
“Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.”
p. 12 -
“As Roland Barthes said, those who do not re-read condemn themselves to reading the same story everywhere: "they recognize what they already think and know.”
p. 12
Bernard Williams on Mind
-
“Two currents of ideas are very prominent in modern thought and culture . On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness --or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled , an eagerness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie behind them. Always familiar in politics , it stretches to historical understanding, to the social sciences , and even to interpretations of discoveries and research in the natural sciences.”
Wikiquote
Bernard Williams on Nature
-
“A further turn is to be found in some "unmasking" accounts of natural science, which aim to show that its pretensions to deliver the truth are unfounded, because of social forces that control its activities. Unlike the case of history, these do not use truths of the same kind; they do not apply science to the criticism of science. They apply the social sciences, and typically depend on the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver truth about science than science is to deliver truth about the world.”
p. 2
Bernard Williams on Time
-
“If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.”
p. 3
Bernard Williams on Truth
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Truthfulness implies a respect for truth.”
Bernard Williams on Virtue
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There can be no good reason for thinking that the moral point of view excludes any other point of view.”
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Moral luck is the experience of being held responsible for what is outside our control.”
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“If a man has integrity, his actions express his deepest convictions.”
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There is no Archimedean point in ethics.”