Bernard Williams Quotes on Truth
Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness (2002) — together with the earlier Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993) — gives late twentieth-century moral and analytic philosophy one of its most distinctive engagements with the genealogical analysis of truth. The central project is the philosophical recovery of the virtues of truth — accuracy and sincerity — through a partly historical reconstruction of the conditions under which a community of speakers comes to value reliable testimony, while resisting both the deflationary dismissal of substantive truth and the postmodern reduction of truth to power. The framework integrates with Williams’s broader moral philosophy — moral luck, internal reasons, the critique of the morality system — and shaped contemporary debate over the political and epistemic significance of truthfulness in late liberal democracy.
Quotes
-
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:
“If a man has integrity, his actions express his deepest convictions.”
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There is no Archimedean point in ethics.”
-
Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Truthfulness implies a respect for truth.”
-
“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 -
“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