Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002 Author: Bernard Williams Michael Wood | Language: English | ISBN:
B00G2LGQG8 | Format: PDF
Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002 Description
Bernard Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the last fifty years, but he was also a distinguished critic and essayist with an elegant style and a rare ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide public. This is the first collection of Williams's popular essays and reviews, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In these pieces, Williams writes about a broad range of subjects, from philosophy and political philosophy to religion, science, the humanities, economics, socialism, feminism, and pornography.
Included here are reviews of major books such as John Rawls's Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism, and Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire. But many of these essays extend beyond philosophy and together provide an intellectual tour through the past half century, from C. S. Lewis and Umberto Eco to Noam Chomsky. No matter the subject, Williams probes and challenges arguments, teases out their implications, and connects them to the wider intellectual scene. At the same time, readers see a first-class mind grappling with landmark books in "real time," before critical consensus had formed and ossified.
In his foreword, Michael Wood discusses Williams's style and sensibility and his concern that philosophy contribute to the larger intellectual conversation.
- File Size: 942 KB
- Print Length: 450 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (January 19, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00G2LGQG8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,521 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Modern
- #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Modern
Not a lot to say about this, since if you are thinking of buying it then you likely already know what you are going to get: 400 pages of unrelenting, ethically informed, in equal measures intimidating and seductive critical intelligence. There can surely have been no more frightening news delivered to any newly published author than that a copy of their book had been sent to Bernard Williams.
Roger Scruton has just published a fairly widely circulated review in which he complains (he is otherwise generously positive - especially considering that Williams dismisses him at one point as 'vapid') that Williams tended to deploy his intelligence to identify the gaps in others' thinking, but avoided setting out positive positions himself. This is at least sort of true, but misses the point about a man who wrote a book on 'Ethics and the limits of Philosophy'. Williams didn't mean that the philosophical tradition is useless, but that its utility is sometimes defined in terms of intellectual hygiene, not in in the setting out of positive positions.
This is 400 pages of intellectual hygiene at its most educational and seductive. It is also, sometimes, laugh out loud funny.
By S. Matthews
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