Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline (ebook)

Argumento de Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline (ebook)

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Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself.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.

"The book should immediately become a staple in the library of anyone with an interest in contemporary English-language philosophy. The collection contains many excellent essays that have been hard to locate for a while, or which have not been previously published. The title essay,'Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,' is a rich and remarkable essay, and this is a splendid collection."--Richard Moran, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, author of Authority and Estrangement (Princeton)

"Bernard Williams brought human life into philosophy, and so into the philosophy of all of us. No one outdid him in his mastery of those abstract complexities without which no real philosophy is possible. But through all the intricate reasonings his eye was always on what counts most: making the best sense of the lives of human beings."--Barry Stroud, University of California at Berkeley

"Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the late twentieth century, who managed to combine an extraordinary philosophical command with an equally impressive gift for keeping in touch with the deepest issues of human life. These essays take up questions about practical reason, the will to believe, and the relation between belief and other mental states, whose modern discussion was transformed by the power and originality of his contributions. Central to all his work is a resistance to what might be called the scientism of much analytical philosophy, something that Williams always stood against in the spheres of ethics and politics."--Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University, and author of The Ethics of Identity (Princeton)

"[Williams emphasized] the role of the local and the historical, the need for philosophy to 'sound right.' One ends Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline wishing that he had another decade both to do the sort of philosophy that 'sounds right' and to tell us more about what made it sound so."--Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books

"His departure from our scene is our loss; we can only be thankful that collections such as this allow discussion with him to continue."--Alan Montefiore, Philosophy

"Editor A.W. Moore . . . has certainly done the scholarly world a service. . . . Williams is a virtuoso practitioner and questioner of philosophy. His task is both positive and negative: positive in that he seeks to carve out a place for distinctively philosophical contributions to human knowledge and well-being (where these contributions are indeed peculiarly philosophical and not scientific), and negative in that he is concerned with the limited nature of these contributions."--Choice

"[Williams's books] reveal just how challenging, and how enjoyable, really imaginative philosophy can be."--Simon Blackburn, New Republic0Preface by Patricia Williams vii
Introduction by A.W.Moore xi

PART ONE: Metaphysics and Epistemology

CHAPTER ONE: Tertullian's Paradox (1955) 3
CHAPTER TWO: Metaphysical Arguments (1957) 22
CHAPTER THREE: Pleasure and Belief (1959) 34
CHAPTER FOUR: Knowledge and Reasons (1972) 47
CHAPTER FIVE: Identity and Identities (1995) 57

PART TWO: Ethics

CHAPTER SIX: The Primacy of Dispositions (1987) 67
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Structure of Hare's Theory (1988) 76
CHAPTER EIGHT: Subjectivism and Toleration (1992) 86
CHAPTER NINE: The Actus Reus of Dr.Caligari (1994) 97
CHAPTER TEN: Values, Reasons, and the Theory of Persuasion (1996) 109
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom (1997) 119
CHAPTER TWELVE: Tolerating the Intolerable (1999) 126
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Human Prejudice (unpublished) 135

PART THREE: The Scope and Limits of Philosophy

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Political Philosophy and the Analytical Tradition (1980) 155
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Philosophy and the Understanding of Ignorance (1995) 169
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2000) 180
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: What Might Philosophy Become? (unpublished) 200

Bernard Williams: Complete Philosophical Publications 215