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“... on the other. In a paper entitled ‘Politics and Moral Character’, written some years ago, Bernard Williams remarked that ‘only those who are reluctant or disinclined to do the morally disagreeable when it is really necessary have much chance of not doing it when it is not necessary.’ The disturbing thing about Machiavelli’s argument is his ...”

“... of living. Keith Hart considers the effect on living standards of the spread of the market. Bernard Williams turns a searching eye on the concept of capabilities. Sen has recently moved from Oxford to Harvard. This is a consequence of the decline that is being forced on British universities. It is also a significant part of the ...”

“... the dilemmas posed by the practical application of Bentham’s celebrated maxim. Yet decades after Bernard Williams pronounced that ‘the day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it,’ Richard Layard, in a book with the title of Happiness, holds out the vision of a Benthamite utopia in which the pursuit of self-interest gives way to a ...”

“... to the Home Office by the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, which advances a case for moral pluralism. The Labour-appointed committee found itself addressing a newly elected Conservative administration which dispatched its findings swiftly into the long grass.It is not obvious why Hilliard takes ...”

“... in relation, for example, to the recent thinking of philosophers like David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (It might also be even harder.) As it is, there seem to be no grounds for optimism at all. For more than a quarter of a century I have found Alasdair MacIntyre the most stirring and the most ...”

“... as it is mysterious in its cause, we came to need nature ‘to bound our activities’, as Bernard Williams argues in a recent essay.† We came to need to define a sphere where we could sustain the illusion that there is still something that we don’t define. The ‘we’ who feel these needs, however, are various. The twitchers, for ...”

“... made up of millions of quarrelsome, naive and opinionated people. Without this unpleasantness, as Bernard Williams once observed, important and worthy political projects would fail. There is no question of a politics of pure authenticity or uncontaminated sincerity. So, if hypocrisy is still a vice in the political realm, it has to connote something more ...”

“... days’. To die thus at just the right moment depends, in life, not on narrative logic but on what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’. It is what enables a person to die when full of days, old but not in terminal misery, correctly mourned by a numerous and prosperous family. It is not an ending one can choose, it is a matter of aesthetics. For ...”

“... in a few quotations Gardiner gives from people who were not critics, artists or journalists. Mrs Williams, for example, mother of the philosopher Bernard Williams, said that Genesis ‘captured the feelings of a pregnant woman in a way that no person could ever have imagined’. And although one of the leaders of the ...”

“... but none of them should play any part in moral philosophy’s critical thought about principles. Bernard Williams, on the other hand, has queried whether theory has any authority to override our intuitive convictions. Many other philosophers are uncomfortable with both of these positions. The dismissal of intuitions seems to open up the danger of a ...”

“... makes him part of a philosophical generation that includes, among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of professing, say, a ...”

“... We hardly ever hear of any pupils, beyond one or two notable undergraduates, including Bernard Williams, to whom he taught prose composition (translation from English into Greek). There is no sense whatever, in the book at least, of an intellectual descent group, of graduate students and younger colleagues, whose ways of understanding the ...”

“... it was raised by Hume, who was rather casual about it, and has more recently been extended by Bernard Williams – is how to bring us to stand in someone else’s shoes and disdain all personal advantage when that someone could be virtually anyone at all. It’s not easy to see how this wide a concern can develop under the normal conditions of any ...”

“... according to certain rules and not others. Yet Foot and those who think like her (including Bernard Williams) reject the analogous position with respect to morality. Assuming that they would not embrace the view that logical reasons depend on our desires, they must then hold that goodness and validity differ fundamentally when it comes to providing ...”

“... ambition which has dominated philosophy since the 17th century – that of reaching what Bernard Williams calls an ‘absolute conception of reality’. The aim is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world, consistent with modern science, which distinguishes between what exists objectively, independent of our minds, and what is ...”