44 Facts About Bernard Williams

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, FBA was an English moral philosopher.

Bernard Williams's publications include Problems of the Self, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness.

The young Bernard Williams was in perpetual intellectual motion, like a dragonfly hovering above a sea of ideas.

Bernard Williams was educated at Chigwell School, an independent school, where he first discovered philosophy.

Bernard Williams shone in the first part of the course, the pure classics and graduated in 1951 with a congratulatory first in the second part of the course and a prize fellowship at All Souls.

Bernard Williams returned to England to take up his fellowship at All Souls and in 1954 became a fellow at New College, Oxford, a position he held until 1959.

Bernard Williams began working for the Daily Mirror and sought election as a Labour MP.

Bernard Williams, a member of the Labour Party, helped her with the 1954 by-election in Harwich in which she was an unsuccessful candidate.

Bernard Williams described it as one of the happiest periods of his life.

In 1958, Bernard Williams spent a term teaching at the University of Ghana in Legon.

In 1961, after four miscarriages in four years, Shirley Bernard Williams gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.

Bernard Williams was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1963, and was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, London, in 1964.

Bernard Williams's wife was elected to parliament that year as the Labour member for Hitchin in Hertfordshire.

Bernard Williams went on to co-found a new centrist party in 1981, the Social Democratic Party; Williams left the Labour Party to join the SDP, although he later returned to Labour.

In 1967, at the age of 38, Bernard Williams became the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College.

Bernard Williams had approached Williams to write the opposing view of utilitarianism for Utilitarianism: For and Against with JJ C Smart, and they had fallen in love.

Patricia Bernard Williams married him that year, and the couple went on to have two sons, Jacob in 1975 and Jonathan in 1980.

Shirley Bernard Williams married the political scientist Richard Neustadt in 1987.

In 1979 Bernard Williams was elected Provost of King's, a position he held until 1987.

Bernard Williams spent a semester in 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley as Mills Visiting Professor and in 1988 left England to become Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy there, announcing to the media that he was leaving as part of the "brain drain" of British academics to America.

Bernard Williams was Sather Professor of Classical Literature at Berkeley in 1989; Shame and Necessity grew out of his six Sather lectures.

Bernard Williams returned to England in 1990 as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and fellow of Corpus Christi.

Bernard Williams's sons had been "at sea" in California, he said, not knowing what was expected of them, and he had been unable to help.

Bernard Williams regretted having made his departure from England so public; he had been persuaded to do so to highlight Britain's relatively low academic salaries.

Bernard Williams served on several royal commissions and government committees: the Public Schools Commission, drug abuse, gambling, the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, and the Commission on Social Justice.

Bernard Williams enjoyed opera from an early age, particularly Mozart and Wagner.

Patricia Bernard Williams writes that he attended performances of the Carl Rosa Company and Sadler's Wells as a teenager.

Bernard Williams served on the board of the English National Opera from 1968 to 1986, and wrote an entry, "The Nature of Opera," for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera.

Bernard Williams became a member of the Institut international de philosophie in 1969, a fellow of the British Academy in 1971 and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.

Bernard Williams died of heart failure on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome; he had been diagnosed in 1999 with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.

Bernard Williams was survived by his wife, their two sons, and his first child, Rebecca.

Bernard Williams did not produce any ethical theory or system; several commentators noted, unfairly in the view of his supporters, that he was largely a critic.

Bernard Williams tried not to lose touch "with the real concerns that animate our ordinary ethical experience," unlike much of the "arid, ahistorical, second-order" debates about ethics in philosophy departments.

Bernard Williams was not an ethical realist, holding that unlike scientific knowledge, which can approach an "absolute conception of reality," an ethical judgment rests on a point of view.

Bernard Williams frequently emphasised what he saw as the ways in which luck pervades ethical life.

Bernard Williams coined and developed the term moral luck, and illustrated the idea of moral luck via a number of enormously influential examples.

Bernard Williams argued that there is a crucial distinction between a person being killed by Jim, and being killed by the captain because of an act or omission of Jim's.

Bernard Williams is the moral actor, the person with the intentions and projects.

Bernard Williams argued that moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity and integrity.

Bernard Williams argued that it is meaningless to say that there are external reasons; reason alone does not move people to action.

Bernard Williams did not propose any systematic philosophical theory; indeed, he was suspicious of any such attempt.

Bernard Williams became known for his dialectical powers, although he was suspicious of them too.

Alan Code wrote that Bernard Williams had never been "impressed by the display of mere dialectical cleverness, least of all in moral philosophy":.

In 1996 Martin Hollis said that Bernard Williams had "a good claim to be the leading British philosopher of his day," but that, although he had a "lovely eye for the central questions," he had none of the answers.