Bernard Williams Quotes on Knowledge
Bernard Williams was a British analytic philosopher and one of the most original and influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. This page collects quotes attributed to Bernard Williams on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There is no Archimedean point in ethics.”
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“p. 1; Chapter 1: The problem”
Wikiquote -
“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 -
“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 -
“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