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Бернард Уильямс, 1929-2003
Jan. 28th, 2007 08:30 pmSir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams FBA (September 21, 1929 – June 10, 2003) was a pre-eminent English moral philosopher who spent virtually the whole of his professional career at the University of Cambridge and the University of Calfornia, Berkeley. At his death, he was called by The Times the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time."
Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: What does it mean to live well? This was a question few analytic philosophers had explored, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral obligation. For Williams, moral obligation, insofar as the phrase had any meaning, had to be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life.
... In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring . . . contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all". The study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution", by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, Williams resembled the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. After beginning by thinking of him as a crude reductionist, in his later career, Williams came to greatly admire Nietzsche - he once even remarked that he wished he could quote Nietzsche on every page he wrote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams
... Like some of the opponents of Socrates, Williams had a keen eye for the moment when politics takes over from moral principle. He spoke of the limits of philosophy, but the limits often seemed more like obstacles to the coherence of ethical thought itself, rather than limits to our philosophical understanding of what ethics is supposed to be. Thus, as legacies of the Enlightenment, both Kantianism and utilitarianism purport to provide a standpoint from which moral criticism can be made, to which in some sense the reasonable agent must listen or ought to listen. Yet this philosophical project of finding some deep bedrock on which our own ordering of thought and conduct stands secure struck him as essentially farcical. He gloriously summed up one example of this rationalism in ethics, Robert Nozick's libertarian theory of rights, simply as "a device for switching off the monitors to earth." Not for Williams "the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people."
Simon Blackburn, "How one man changed the meaning of human reason," The New Republic, January 22, 2007
Книги Улиьямса, почитать:
# Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
# Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harvester Press, 1978.
# Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
# Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
# Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1993.
# Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
# Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press, 2002. (Chapter 1 online)
# In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton University Press, 2005.
# The Sense Of The Past: Essays In The Philosophy Of History, 2006.
# Philosophy As A Humanistic Discipline. Edited by A. W. Moore, 2006.
Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: What does it mean to live well? This was a question few analytic philosophers had explored, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral obligation. For Williams, moral obligation, insofar as the phrase had any meaning, had to be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life.
... In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring . . . contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all". The study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution", by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, Williams resembled the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. After beginning by thinking of him as a crude reductionist, in his later career, Williams came to greatly admire Nietzsche - he once even remarked that he wished he could quote Nietzsche on every page he wrote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams
... Like some of the opponents of Socrates, Williams had a keen eye for the moment when politics takes over from moral principle. He spoke of the limits of philosophy, but the limits often seemed more like obstacles to the coherence of ethical thought itself, rather than limits to our philosophical understanding of what ethics is supposed to be. Thus, as legacies of the Enlightenment, both Kantianism and utilitarianism purport to provide a standpoint from which moral criticism can be made, to which in some sense the reasonable agent must listen or ought to listen. Yet this philosophical project of finding some deep bedrock on which our own ordering of thought and conduct stands secure struck him as essentially farcical. He gloriously summed up one example of this rationalism in ethics, Robert Nozick's libertarian theory of rights, simply as "a device for switching off the monitors to earth." Not for Williams "the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people."
Simon Blackburn, "How one man changed the meaning of human reason," The New Republic, January 22, 2007
Книги Улиьямса, почитать:
# Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
# Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harvester Press, 1978.
# Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
# Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
# Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1993.
# Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
# Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press, 2002. (Chapter 1 online)
# In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton University Press, 2005.
# The Sense Of The Past: Essays In The Philosophy Of History, 2006.
# Philosophy As A Humanistic Discipline. Edited by A. W. Moore, 2006.
