“... 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 ...”

“... namely, what is to the maximum degree independent of conceptual scheme – has been thought by Bernard Williams, in his recent Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, to delimit science, and to distinguish science from ethics. In Quine’s view, Williams is wrong. It is not total science that is ‘to the maximum ...”

“... in the most creative and the most effective way, we need to see metaphysics in the way in which Bernard Williams famously urged us to see philosophy as a whole: as a humanistic discipline. This is very different from the way in which Sider sees it. Nevertheless, there is much to applaud in this fascinating book. Even if it is not for metaphysicians to ...”

“... we need if we’re to be ‘reasonable’. (‘Desire-independent’ against those like Hume and Bernard Williams who have argued that external reasons to act are effective only if they fit a pre-existing desire, an internal ‘motivational set’.) Institutions need reasonableness and reasonableness needs institutions. Without institutions and the ...”

“... essential to – human life. It is for this reason that he objects to the fantasy of immortality (Bernard Williams objected to it on the grounds of its tedium): It is essential to our idea of life that it is temporally bounded, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with stages of development defining its normal trajectory. A life without temporal ...”

“... some of the distinctions we make. Likewise the possibilities of moral scepticism discussed by Bernard Williams in ‘Moral Luck’, an essay she has earlier attacked, do not depend on a failure to realise that all ordinary language, including his own in the essay, is impregnated with notions of praise and blame: they anticipate a potential ...”

“... and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as Descartes. There ...”

“... prodigy’ – precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile intellectualism: ‘all aversions to ordinary ...”

“... that there is reason to donate: we understand what such a claim would mean. (Parfit reports that Bernard Williams seemed genuinely not to understand such claims, but he thinks that may be because Williams lacked a concept that the rest of us have.) Parfit argues in a similar vein against a wide range of positions in ...”

“... has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, John ...”

“... and getting more exasperated with each other as the decades went by. Later in his book he uses Bernard Williams as a contemporary foil for Dewey, and this is an excellent choice. Dewey enjoyed debunking what he called ‘the alleged discipline of epistemology’ and ‘the epistemology industry’: he was convinced that the whole tradition of ...”

“... the realist case has been put recently by such notables as Stuart Hampshire, Bonnie Honig, Bernard Williams, John Gray and Liz Frazer. There are no moral skyhooks from which politics can be hung. It is quite hard to understand, except perhaps as a relic of state-of-nature theory, why anyone should think that morality is given, while politics ...”

“... epitomised by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese’. Even the term ‘analytic philosophy’ is misleading. When it ...”

“... doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny when it is. First, some wants rest on straightforward error: Bernard Williams gave the example of someone who wants to drink what’s in a glass, believing it to be gin, when in fact it is petrol. Other wants, while not resting on false beliefs, may be problematic from the viewpoint even of the person who has them. I ...”