Williams ¹⁶

Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength

In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf

Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.

conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change

Une normativité sans histoire ? Foucault, Engel et la normativité de la vérité

Forthcoming in Dialogue : Revue canadienne de philosophie

By shielding the concept of truth from Foucauldian historicism, Pascal Engel ends up leaving the “virtues of truth” even more exposed to Foucault’s negative genealogy. This article proposes a more ambitious reading of the positive genealogy of these virtues, demonstrating that cultivating accuracy and sincerity as intrinsic values is a functional necessity rather than a historical accident. Vindicating these dispositions’ status as virtues provides a more robust defence against both Foucauldian cynicism and contemporary indifference to truth.

truth, normativity, epistemic norms, epistemic virtues, belief, assertion

Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically

With Marcel van Ackeren. In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 14–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.003.0003

Distinguishes four different connections between philosophy and history. (1) Philosophy cannot ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) When engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still has to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically—that is, primarily to produce philosophy—requires a keen sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. (4) Systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand.

methodology, historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century

Internalism from the Ethnographic Stance: From Self-Indulgence to Self-Expression and Corroborative Sense-Making

The Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3): 1094–1120. 2025. doi:10.1093/pq/pqae051

Argues that Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons is the philosophical underpinning of his liberalism, and that it needs to be understood in relation to his later work on the normativity of genealogical explanation and the ethnographic stance, where we imaginatively inhabit a conceptual and motivational perspective without endorsing it.

deliberation, ethics, genealogy, history, internalism, metaethics

Williams’s Debt to Wittgenstein

In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 283–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. With Nikhil Krishnan.

Argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be interpreted as evolving dialectically from those of Wittgenstein.

history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, british philosophy, philosophy of language, Bernard Williams

Moralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics

Political Philosophy 1 (2): 432–462. 2024. doi:10.16995/pp.17532

Argues that both moralism in ethics and political moralism originate from a problematic dualism that transforms the useful distinction between the moral and the non-moral into a rigid divide. As the historical comparison with ancient Greek thought shows, this obscures genuine conflicts of values and fails to adequately address complex political realities such as “dirty hands” situations.

ethics, political moralism, realism, conflicts of values, Hume, Bernard Williams

The Dworkin–Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1): 3–29. 2024. doi:10.1111/phpr.13002

By reconstructing the little-known Dworkin-Williams debate over whether political concepts like liberty and equality can and should be reconciled to avoid conflict, the article explores the nature of political values, the limits of philosophical intervention in politics, the challenge of pluralism, and the conditions for political legitimacy in the face of inevitable conflict and loss.

conceptual engineering, legitimacy, political realism, pluralism, Williams, conceptual change

Virtue Ethics and the Morality System

Topoi 43 (2): 413–424. 2024. With Marcel van Ackeren. doi:10.1007/s11245-023-09964-9

Shows that “morality systems” in Williams’s sense are not confined to Kantian ethics, but are characterized by the organizing ambition to shelter human agency from contingency. Argues that this ambition and the reconceptualization of human psychology it draws on can be traced back to Stoicism.

ethics, moral luck, morality system, moral psychology, blame, normativity

Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Mind 132 (525): 234–243. 2023. doi:10.1093/mind/fzaa077

Reviews a collection of essays on Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and offers a substantive defense of Williams against Humean critiques, arguing that Williams does employ vindicatory genealogies for basic ethical concepts like obligation, but separates these from their distortion within the morality system. Synthesizes diverse interpretations of Williams’s relativism of distance and practical necessity, recasting them not as skepticism but as inquiries into authenticity and the irreducible first-person nature of deliberation. Frames the collection as evidence that Williams’s project was not merely destructive, but a liberating attempt to legitimize ethical thoughts that exist outside the rigid constraints of modern moral theory.

Bernard Williams, ethics, genealogy, morality system, metaethics, deliberation

The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique

European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 226–247. 2023. With Nikhil Krishnan. doi:10.1111/ejop.12794

Offers a new reading of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by bringing out the wider cultural resonances of the book. Far from being simply a critique of academic tendencies, the book turns out to be about ethical issues that acquired particular urgency in the wake of WWII: the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life.

cultural critique, ethics, analytic philosophy, authority, 20th century, british philosophy

A Shelter from Luck: The Morality System Reconstructed

In Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), 184–211. New York: Oxford University Press. 2022. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197626566.003.0009

Offers a synthesis of Williams’s critical remarks on Kantian morality; the key idea is that modern morality strives to shelter life from luck.

agency, ethics, blame, moral luck, morality system, voluntariness

Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche

The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026

Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.

conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century

From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy

Mind 129 (515): 683–714. 2020. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy083

Why would philosophers interested in the points or functions of our conceptual practices bother with genealogical explanations if they can focus directly on paradigmatic examples of the practices we now have? This paper offers three reasons why the genealogical approach earns its keep and formulates criteria for determining when it is called for.

explanation, functions, genealogy, history, historiography, methodology

Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?

The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 100–120. 2019. doi:10.1093/pq/pqy041

Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology holds that the concept of knowledge is primitive and explanatorily fundamental. This seems to leave little room for attempts to give a genealogical explanation of the concept of knowledge, much less ones that explain the formation of the concept of knowledge in terms of the concept of belief, as E.J. Craig does. Yet I argue that Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge not only is compatible with knowledge-first epistemology, but actually lends succour to it.

Craig, epistemology, genealogy, methodology, Williams, knowledge-first epistemology

Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality

Philosophers’ Imprint 18 (17): 1–20. 2018. doi:2027/spo.3521354.0018.017

Reconstructs Williams’s genealogical investigation into the social function of the norms of truthfulness and brings out its social and political implications. Develops an understanding of this “pragmatic” form of the genealogical method which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call “self-effacing functionality”—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality.

Bernard Williams, ethics, functionality, genealogy, naturalism, truth

Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy

Studia Philosophica 76: 137–52. 2017. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2017.76008

Develops Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline.

historiography, metaphilosophy, philosophy of history, analytic philosophy, 20th century, Williams