Bernard Williams

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was an English philosopher, born in 1929 and died in 2003, whose publications include Problems of the Self in 1973, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in 1985, Shame and Necessity in 1993 and Truth and Truthfulness in 2002; he was knighted in 1999. As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy toward psychology, history and especially the ancient Greeks, and he was skeptical of attempts to give moral philosophy a single secure foundation. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded philosophy come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life, and Williams was widely regarded, in Colin McGinn's phrase, as an analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist.