Bernard Williams: Moral Anti-Theory and Ethical Necessity

The course aims to present, in their entirety, the two key texts of the moral thought of Bernard Williams: namely, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993). In these works,as well as in some corollary writings we shall equally survey, we find articulated his staunch criticism of large portions of modern and contemporary ethics and the parallel excavation of a somewhat underplayed yet eventful ancient canon in moral thinking. Williams almost single-handedly operated a radical reconfiguration of moral theorizing in the direction of its de-systematization and de-transcendentalization, suggesting a line of thinking, in moral matters, which does without such crucial notions as principles, duty, rights, and obligation, lying at the heart of the most representative modern and contemporary approaches to moral matters. In the light of this criticism, Williams turns to the ancients, and especially to Greeks authors within and without (what we now, customarily take to be) philosophy, to show how, despite the obvious historical distance (also finely problematized by Williams), we are, in a sense, still very much working in the wake of the their own struggle to square necessity with both autonomy and responsibility in our quests for identities formation and transformation.

B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Fontana Press, 1985 (20113)
B. Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 (20082)
A. Thomas (ed.), Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007