Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

Bernard Williams, A. W. Moore, A. Moore

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691134093
  9780691124261
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400827091
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.


Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human."



Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Metaphysics and Epistemology
• One Tertullian’s Paradox (1955)
• Two Metaphysical Arguments (1957)
• Three Pleasure and Belief (1959)
• Four Knowledge and Reasons (1972)
• Five Identity and Identities (1995)
• Part Two: Ethics
• Six The Primacy of Dispositions (1987)
• Seven The Structure of Hare’s Theory (1988)
• Eight Subjectivism and Toleration (1992)
• Nine The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari (1994)
• Ten Values, Reasons, and the Theory of Persuasion (1996)
• Eleven Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom (1997)
• Twelve Tolerating the Intolerable (1999)
• Thirteen The Human Prejudice (unpublished)
• Part Three: The Scope and Limits of Philosophy
• Fourteen Political Philosophy and the Analytical Tradition (1980)
• Fifteen Philosophy and the Understanding of Ignorance (1995)
• Sixteen Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2000)
• Seventeen What Might Philosophy Become? (unpublished)
• Bernard Williams:Complete Philosophical Publications