Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks.Mark P. Jenkins, Bernard Williams, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014 , 3.Colin Koopman, "Bernard Williams on Philosophy's Need for History," The Review of Metaphysics, 64(1), September 2010, 3–30. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."Martha C. Nussbaum, "Tragedies, hope, justice," in Daniel Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, 213.
Williams was a strong supporter of women in academia; according to Nussbaum, he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be."Martha C. Nussbaum, "Tragedy and Justice" , Boston Review, October/November 2003. He was also famously sharp in conversation. Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams's mentors at Oxford University, said that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your own sentence."
Life Early life and education
Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend, Essex, to Hilda Amy Williams, née Day, a personal assistant, and Owen Pasley Denny Williams, chief maintenance surveyor for the Ministry of Works.Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Sir Bernard Williams, 73, Oxford Philosopher, Dies", The New York Times, 14 June 2003.Supplement to the London Gazette, 10 June 1961, 4157. He was educated at Chigwell School, an independent school, where he first discovered philosophy.Stuart Jeffries, "The Quest for Truth", The Guardian, 30 November 2002. Reading D. H. Lawrence led him to ethics and the problems of the self. In his first book, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he quoted with approval Lawrence's advice to "[f]ind your deepest impulse, and follow that."Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 79.
Awarded a scholarship to Oxford, Williams read Greats (pure classics followed by ancient history and philosophy) at Balliol. Among his influences at Oxford were W. S. Watt, Russell Meiggs, R. M. Hare, Elizabeth Anscombe, Eric Dodds, Eduard Fraenkel, David Pears and Gilbert Ryle.A. W. Moore, "Williams, Sir Bernard Arthur Owen (1929–2003), philosopher", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 2007. He shone in the first part of the course, the pure classics (being particularly fond of writing Latin verses in the style of Ovid) and graduated in 1951 with a congratulatory first in the second part of the course and a prize fellowship at All Souls.Bernard Williams, "A Mistrustful Animal: A Conversation with Bernard Williams," Harvard Review 12.1: 2004. Reprinted in Alex Voorhoeve (ed.), Conversations on Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 196–197.
After Oxford, Williams spent his two-year national service flying Spitfires in Canada for the Royal Air Force. While on leave in New York, he became close to Shirley Brittain Catlin (born 1930), daughter of the novelist Vera Brittain and the political scientist George Catlin. They had already been friends at Oxford. Catlin had moved to New York to study economics at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship.
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.Alan Code, Samuel Scheffler, Barry Stroud, "In Memoriam: Bernard A. O. Williams" , University of California. He and Catlin continued seeing each other. She began working for the Daily Mirror and sought election as a Labour MP. Williams, also a member of the Labour Party, helped her with the 1954 by-election in Harwich in which she was an unsuccessful candidate.Shirley Williams 2009, 104, 114.
First marriage, London
Bernard Williams and Shirley Catlin were married in London in July 1955 at St James's, Spanish Place, near Marylebone High Street, followed by a honeymoon in Lesbos, Greece.Shirley Williams 2009, 116–117.
The couple moved into a very basic ground-floor apartment in London, on Clarendon Road, Notting Hill. Given how hard it was to find decent housing, they decided instead to share with Helge Rubinstein and her husband, the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, who at the time was working for his uncle, Victor Gollancz. In 1955, the four of them bought a four-storey, seven-bedroom house in Phillimore Place, Kensington, for £6,800, a home they lived in together for 14 years.Shirley Williams 2009, 120, 136, 154. Williams described it as one of the happiest periods of his life.
In 1958, Williams spent a term teaching at the University of Ghana in Legon. When he returned to England in 1959, he was appointed lecturer in philosophy at University College London.Shirley Williams 2009, 132. In 1961, after four miscarriages in four years, Shirley Williams gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.Shirley Williams, God and Caesar: Personal Reflections on Politics and Religion, A&C Black, 2004, 17; Shirley Williams 2009, 132, 139.
Williams was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1963, and was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, London, (merged with Royal Holloway, University of London) in 1964. His wife was elected to parliament that year as the Labour member for Hitchin in Hertfordshire.Shirley Williams 2009, 143, 155. The Sunday Times described the couple two years later as "the New Left at its most able, most generous, and sometimes most eccentric." Andy Beckett wrote that they "entertained refugees from eastern Europe and politicians from Africa, and drank sherry in noteworthy quantities."Andy Beckett, "Centre forward", The Guardian, 2 April 2005. Shirley Williams became a junior minister and, in 1971, Shadow Home Secretary. Several newspapers saw her as a future prime minister.Maya Oppenheim, "Baroness Shirley Williams: The Lib Dem co-founder once predicted to become the first female prime minister of Britain", The Independent, 11 February 2016. She 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.
Cambridge, second marriage
In 1967, at the age of 38, Williams became the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College.
According to Jane O'Grady, Williams was central to the decision by King's in 1972 to admit women, one of the first three all-male Oxbridge undergraduate colleges to do so.Jane O'Grady, "Professor Sir Bernard Williams", The Guardian, 13 June 2003. In both his first and second marriages, he supported his wives in their careers and helped with the children more than was common for men at the time. In the 1970s, when Nussbaum's thesis supervisor, G. E. L. Owen, was harassing female students, and she decided nevertheless to support him, Williams told her, during a walk along the backs at Cambridge: "[Y]ou know, there is a price you are paying for this support and encouragement. Your dignity is being held hostage. You really don't have to put up with this."Martha C. Nussbaum, "'Don't smile so much': Philosophy and Women in the 1970s," in Linda Martín Alcoff (ed.), Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003 (93–108), 100.
Shirley Williams's political career (the House of Commons regularly sat until 10 pm) meant that the couple spent much of their time apart. They bought a house in Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire, near the border with south Cambridgeshire, while she lived in Phillimore Place during the week to be close to the Houses of Parliament. Sunday was often the only day they were together.Shirley Williams 2009, 156–157."Shirley Williams: Views from the peer", Hertfordshire Life, 13 January 2010. The differences in their personal values – he was an atheist, she a Catholic – placed a further strain on their relationship. It reached breaking point in 1970 when Williams formed a relationship with Patricia Law Skinner, a commissioning editor for Cambridge University Press and wife of the historian Quentin Skinner.Mike Peel, Shirley Williams: The Biography, London: Biteback Publishing, 2013, 157. She had approached Williams to write the opposing view of utilitarianism for Utilitarianism: For and Against with J. J. C. Smart (1973), and they had fallen in love.
Williams and Skinner began living together in 1971. He obtained a divorce in 1974 (at Shirley Williams' request, the marriage was later annulled by the Catholic Church). Patricia Skinner married him that year, and the couple went on to have two sons, Jacob in 1975 and Jonathan in 1980. Shirley Williams married the political scientist Richard Neustadt in 1987.
Berkeley and Oxford
In 1979 Williams was elected Provost of King's, a position he held until 1987. He 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. He was also Sather Professor of Classical Literature at Berkeley in 1989; Shame and Necessity (1995) grew out of his six Sather lectures.
Williams returned to England in 1990 as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and fellow of Corpus Christi. His sons had been "at sea" in California, he said, not knowing what was expected of them, and he had been unable to help. He regretted having made his departure from England so public; he had been persuaded to do so to highlight Britain's relatively low academic salaries. When he retired in 1996, he took up a fellowship again at All Souls.
Royal commissions, committees
Williams served on several royal commissions and government committees: the Public Schools Commission (1965–1970), drug abuse (1971), gambling (1976–1978), the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (1979), and the Commission on Social Justice (1993–1994). "I did all the major vices," he said. While on the gambling commission, one of his recommendations, ignored at the time, was for a national lottery. (John Major's government introduced one in 1994.)