Bernard Williams Quotes on Knowledge
Bernard Williams (1929–2003), whose Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and the late Truth and Truthfulness (2002) supplied late-twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy with several of its most discussed positions, defended a fundamental distinction between the cognitive aspiration to an "absolute conception" of the world — a conception describing the world independent of any perspective — and the irreducibly perspectival character of ethical knowledge. The framework grounds Williams's broader case against the moral philosophical orthodoxies of utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, and Truth and Truthfulness develops the corresponding genealogical analysis of the virtues of accuracy and sincerity that any stable cognitive practice presupposes.
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