Nikhil Krishnan

The English original of Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy was published in 1985. Since its publication, it has provoked a substantial body of philosophical commentary, sympathetic as well as critical. Williams’s introduction to the 1990 French translation of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is an unusual text and an illuminating new source for readers of Williams. Refreshingly, it reflects an effort on Williams’s part to establish a connection with a new set of readers. It is also the work of a philosopher relishing the freedoms that come from not having to connect with the old one. Does his introduction itself benefit from a further introduction? We believe that it does, and for the same reason that the book needed some prefatory words before it could be put into the hands of French readers: because the work is not, or no longer, fully self-explanatory.

Scholarship historicizing John Rawls has put paid to the view that his work was without precedent. This article sets out to find out why, then, A Theory of Justice stirred such philosophical excitement, even among British philosophers in a position to recognize its antecedents. I advance the view that his work is helpfully understood as fulfilling the promise of the “naturalist” revival in ethics begun at Oxford by Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. After briefly surveying the development of analytic philosophy, I argue that Rawls's contribution was to reconceive ethics so that it was an investigation neither of an independent ethical reality nor of the logic of moral language. Rather, it was concerned with a class of facts about ourselves. Rawls's practice of ethics adopts as its central focus the ongoing human practice of justification. I place Rawls's turn from religious faith to justification between persons alongside similar shifts in Plato's Euthyphro and in the biographies of Kant and Sidgwick. I try to show the distinctiveness of Rawls's focus by contrasting his search for human self-understanding with the project of R. M. Hare, his most prominent non-naturalist critic, who charged Rawls with offering an inadequate account of the authority of ethics.

ABSTRACTThe Victorian period in Britain saw the curious emergence of the word ‘brick’ as a term of high praise, picking out for commendation certain qualities of character: reliability and a lack of whimsy. The novels and everyday conversation of the period were full of such phrases as ‘you’re a brick’ or ‘he’s a regular brick’. In this paper, I trace the history of this phrase in the respectable as well as popular literature of the period, including some ironic attempts to claim for it a classical pedigree. I offer some hypotheses about how we might understand the metaphor of the brick in terms of the needs and values of mainstream British culture in the period. As an illuminating contrast, I consider the fate of a similar metaphor from mid-twentieth-century culture, ‘square’, which picks out roughly similar qualities of character but to reprove them. I conclude with some theoretical reflections on how the study of outdated colloquialisms might bring the resources of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the history of moral concepts.

Many moral philosophers tend to construe the aims of ethics as the interpretation and critique of ‘common-sense morality’. This approach is defended by Henry Sidgwick in his influential The Methods of Ethics and presented as a development of a basically Socratic idea of philosophical method. However, Sidgwick's focus on our general beliefs about right and wrong action drew attention away from the Socratic insistence on treating beliefs as one expression of our wider dispositions. Understanding the historical contingency of Sidgwick's approach to ethics can help us reflect on whether there are other ways in which modern ethics can be Socratic.

Philippa Foot, like others of her philosophical generation, was much concerned with the status and authority of morality. How universal are its demands, and how dependent on the idiosyncrasies of individuals? In the early years of her career, she was persuaded that Kant and his twentieth-century followers had been wrong to insist on the centrality to morality of absolute and unconditionally binding moral imperatives. To that extent, she wrote, there was indeed ‘an element of deception in the official line about morality’. In this paper, I shall explore her early alternative: a system of merely ‘hypothetical’ imperatives, imperatives that depend on the motivations of particular individuals. Could so contingent a system deserve to be termed a morality? How revisionary a proposal was this, and how serious its costs? And how might we reconcile ourselves to a morality stripped of what she called the ‘fictions’ that surrounded it? Foot's early answer, tentative and exploratory, remains of interest, long after she herself abandoned it.

Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being ‘principally about how things are in moral philosophy’? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams’s solution to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams’s philosophical concerns – with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world – to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post-war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition’s inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment.

This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. It is shown how this is not a sudden conversion, but the direct product of Williams’s longstanding critical engagement with Wittgenstein’s methodology and metaphilosophy: Williams arrives at this position by envisaging a Wittgensteinianism that thinks in concrete sociohistorical terms, embraces genuine explanation, and relinquishes its insistence on the purity of philosophy. When properly understood, moreover, this critique turns out to be continuous with Williams’s advocacy of a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Finally, it is shown that Williams inherits from Wittgenstein a certain understanding of how philosophy can help us to live, in particular the therapeutic ambition to liberate us from distortions in our self-understanding by assembling reminders.

What are the limits of language? How can philosophy be brought closer to everyday life? What is a good human being? These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience. A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of some of Oxford's most innovative thinkers. Far from being stuck in their ivory towers, the Oxford philosophers lived. They were codebreakers, diplomats, and soldiers in both World Wars, and they often drew on their real-world experience in creating their greatest works, masterpieces of British modernism original in both thought and style.