Bernard Williams

Also known as Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen Williams

English moral philosopher (1929–2003)

Person · Open Library

Works: 45

Top works

Fröhliche Wissenschaft
Truth and Truthfulness
Rene Lalique
Morality
Jailbait; the Story of Juvenile Delinquency

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1932-02-08

2008 universal fire victimacademy award winneramericanamerican composercinematic classicalclassical

Discography

Official site Discogs Stream

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 42
Total plays: 257

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

The PHQ-9
· 2001 · cited 38,226x
A Brief Measure for Assessing Generalized Anxiety Disorder
· 2006 · cited 27,817x
Learning representations by back-propagating errors
· 1986 · cited 23,577x
The Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3)
· 2016 · cited 22,840x
Geant4—a simulation toolkit
· 2003 · cited 20,906x

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Quotes

“Two currents of ideas are very prominent in modern thought and culture. On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness--or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled, an eagerness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie behind them. Always familiar in politics, it stretches to historical understanding, to the social sciences, and even to interpretations of discoveries and research in the natural sciences.”
“If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.”
“Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional interpretations of those areas; they sense that it has something to do with truth; and (no doubt driven by the familiar desire to say something at once hugely general, deeply important, and reassuringly simple) they extend their worry to the notion of truth itself.”
“Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.”
“As Roland Barthes said, those who do not re-read condemn themselves to reading the same story everywhere: "they recognize what they already think and know."”

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Key facts

Born: Bernard Arthur Owen Williams , ( 1929-09-21 ) 21 September 1929, Westcliff-on-Sea , England
Died: 10 June 2003 (2003-06-10) (aged 73), Rome , Italy
Spouses: Shirley Brittain Catlin ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1955 ; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. 1974 ) Patricia Law Skinner, ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1974 )
Education: Chigwell School
Alma mater: Balliol College, Oxford
Academic advisors: R. M. Hare , Gilbert Ryle
Era: Contemporary philosophy
Region: Western philosophy
School: Analytic philosophy
Institutions: All Souls College, Oxford New College, Oxford University College, London Bedford College, London King's College, Cambridge University of California, Berkeley Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Notable students: Myles Burnyeat
Main interests: Ethics
Notable ideas: Internal reasons for action , moral luck , dirty hands , demandingness objection

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Wikidata facts

Show 3 more facts

date of birth: 1929-09-21
date of death: 2003-06-10
P12749: Alois Bierl

Sources (7)

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~25 min read

Article

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (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 to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."