In this book Bernard Williams delivers a sustained indictment of moral theory from Kant onward. His goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Politics & Social Sciences

Williams, Bernard

Philosophy

Fontana Press / Collins

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'.His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' Meditations are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. This is essential reading for any student of philosophy. This reissue includes a new foreword by John Cottingham.

Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry

Penguin??Books

Page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Bernard Williams, who died in 2003, was one of the most influential moral philosophers of his generation. A lifelong opera lover, his articles and essays, talks for the BBC, contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Opera, and program notes for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera, generated a devoted following. This elegant volume brings together these widely scattered and largely unobtainable pieces, including two that have not been previously published. It covers an engaging range of topics from Mozart to Wagner, including sparkling essays on specific operas by those composers as well as Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Janacek, and Tippett. Reflecting Williams’s brilliance, passion, and clarity of mind, these essays engage with, and illustrate, the enduring appeal of opera as an art form.

On Opera

Arts & Photography

Music

Yale University Press

Bernard Williams was one of the most influential moral philosophers of his generation. A life-long opera-lover, his articles and essays, talks for the BBC, contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Opera, and programme-notes for The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera, generated a devoted following.  This elegant volume brings together these widely scattered and largely unobtainable pieces, including two that have not been previously published. It covers an engaging range of topics from Mozart to Wagner, including sparkling essays on specific operas by those composers as well as Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Janacek and Tippett. Two aspects of music are of central importance to Williams: the demands of composing, performing and staging opera on the one hand, and the immediacy and power of its emotional purchase, the ability of music to move both the heart and the intellect, on the other. Reflecting Williams's brilliance, passion, and clarity of mind, these essays engage with, and illustrate, the enduring appeal of opera as an art form.  Bernard Williams was Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University. He was a member of the board of the English National Opera in London, and author of many articles on music.

British Analytical Philosophy

Montefiore, Alan

Prometheus+books

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge Classics)

With a new foreword by Jonathan Lear 'Remarkably lively and enjoyable…It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.' - Times Literary Supplement Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Drawing on the ideas of the Greek philosophers, Williams reorients ethics away from a preoccupation with universal moral theories towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition also includes a commentary on the text by A.W.Moore. At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was hailed by the Times as 'the outstanding moral philosopher of his age.' He taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford and is the author of many influential books, including Morality; Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (available from Routledge) and Truth and Truthfulness.

Routledge

Utilitarianism: For and Against

Two essays on utilitarianism, written from opposite points of view, by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams. In the first part of the book Professor Smart advocates a modern and sophisticated version of classical utilitarianism; he tries to formulate a consistent and persuasive elaboration of the doctrine that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined solely by their consequences, and in particular their consequences for the sum total of human happiness. This is a revised version of Professor Smart's famous essay 'an outline of a system of utilitarian ethics', first published in 1961 but long unobtainable. In Part II Bernard Williams offers a sustained and vigorous critique of utilitarian assumptions, arguments and ideals. He finds inadequate the theory of action implied by utilitarianism, and he argues that utilitarianism fails to engage at a serious level with the real problems of moral and political philosophy, and fails to make sense of notions such as integrity, or even human happiness itself. Both authors are agreed on utilitarianism's importance: it cuts across a number of different philosophical disputes and combines a systematic account of mata-ethical problems with a distinctive and substantive moral stand. It thus is, or involves, philosophy in both the traditional and the narrower, professional sense of the word, and is a key topic (often the first topic) in introductory philosophy courses. This book should also be of interest to welfare economists, political scientists and decision-theorists.

Smart, J.J.C.

Cambridge University Press

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. Shame and Necessity gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world.

Shame and Necessity

History

Ancient Civilizations

University of California Press

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

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Books by Williams, Bernard

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Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry

Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry

On Opera

On Opera

British Analytical Philosophy

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge Classics)

Utilitarianism: For and Against

Shame and Necessity

Shame and Necessity