Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: One goal underlying Bernard Williams’ important work in philosophy is to counteract the pressures science exerts on our thinking. Different forms of scientism threaten to sidetrack philosophy from its true business of making sense of humanity at a particular historical juncture. In particular, Williams noted how a scientism of style and procedure impairs not just our thinking or writing but even our reading. For instance, if we look in earlier philosophers only for superseded answers to contemporary questions, we miss the opportunity to learn of significant but forgotten problems. In philosophy, we must avoid a reading that destroys the point of studying what one reads. A ‘non-destructive’ reading is the least to expect from a collection of 12 essays entitled Reading Bernard Williams, especially when its introduction ends with ‘But don't listen to me: read Bernard Williams!’ (p. 6). Fittingly therefore, Frances Ferguson explains in ‘Bernard Williams and the importance of being literarily earnest’ how Williams understood the benefit of reading literature. Literature does not just offer opportunities for ‘sympathetic identification [ … with] a host of characters’ and for enacting ‘in reading the accommodation of differences’ (p. 197) that contemporary moral and political doctrines such as liberalism call for. Literature, through ‘the connection between character and plot, makes plain the distinctiveness of persons and the ineliminability of character’—major elements in Williams’ criticism of ‘universalizing perspectives in morality’ (p. 205). In contrast, Charles Guignon (‘Williams and the phenomenological tradition’) does not offer a reading but catalogues overlapping and diverging thoughts in phenomenology. Conceivably, a confrontation with genealogical authors with whom Williams felt an affinity (Nietzsche or Foucault) might have improved our understanding of Williams more.
Source: The Philosophical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1093/pq/pqt008
Author: Tim Heysse
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2332444149