Bernard Williams on Philosophy & History, edited by Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz, Oxford University Press, 488 pp, £110, ISBN: ‎978-0192870063.

Bernard Williams is universally acknowledged as a great humanist and one of the major philosophers of his time. Since his death in 2003 there has been a continuous stream of books on his work, of which this large volume is the latest. This is unusual in academic philosophy; there is normally a period in which people draw breath before revisiting even those thinkers who continue to deserve attention.

Part of the explanation is the sheer scope of his work. After the introduction this volume partitions its twenty-two contributors into five sections: Antiquity, Enlightenment, Modernity, Methodology and the History of Philosophy, and History and Genealogy. A full explanation would also cite the attractive nature of Williams’s writing and conversation. As Miranda Fricker nicely puts it, his ‘thinking and conversation and writing were somehow essentially animated: agile, funny, erudite, candid, rather free with delicious anecdote or ironical comment’. His conversation was delightful, although his writing can prompt puzzlement or even irritation – no sooner has he jumped one fence then he is off to the next one that has captured his interest. He repays reading but resists pigeonholing, refusing to be pinned down, or to defend one or another of the many ‘isms’ (realism, idealism, historicism, empiricism, relativism that give the bearings usually used to categorise philosophers). He especially hated the big theories found in moral philosophy: utilitarianism, Kantianism. Consequently, identifying what he holds can feel alarmingly like trying to get hold of a piece of quicksilver. Being elusive, he also tends to elude criticism, although as several contributors here show he doesn’t always escape.

As its title suggests, the centre of gravity of this volume is Williams’s relationship with history and especially with the history of philosophy. He came up through Oxford’s ‘Greats’, a course that mingles philosophy with ancient history and languages (Greek and Latin), so it is appropriate that the first tranche of contributions concern his relation with the classics. Two of these, those of Terence Irwin and Sophie Grace Chappell, are among the more critical papers.

One of Williams’s signature claims is that the Greeks before Plato avoided mistakes that only bubbled up in Plato, but which continue to bedevil thought into the present. The older writers Homer and Thucydides, according to Williams, are free from our notion of ‘the will’ and are better off without it. The suspect notion of the will is ‘essentially ethical’, in that after Plato and Aristotle, but not before, we think of the will as ‘rational’ and as potentially in opposition to brute desires, which it exists to control. By contrast in the pre-Platonic conception the only rational function of the will is to find ways of carrying out our desires. Irwin shows quite convincingly that this is not true to Homer, who describes how Odysseus, shocked and disgusted at the way Penelope’s maids are cavorting with the suitors who infested his palace in his absence, wrestles down his impulse to execute them immediately, on the grounds that it would be better done later. This is an exercise of a rational will, or at least one that can mobilise other thoughts and desires to stand in opposition to a particular desire and can thereby control it. Contrary to Williams, Homer could use that notion well before Plato came on the scene. In this volume Carla Bagnoli also salutes Kant for understanding that with practical reasoning we can take a ‘reflective detachment’ from passions or desires, and it seems that Homer preceded him.

This may seem like a small, perhaps pedantic, point in the interpretation of the classics, but it is more than that. Williams emphasises the importance of history to philosophy because in history we come upon ways of thought whose difference from our own can be identified, and which can cast doubt on the inevitability (and claimed superiority) of our own concepts and categories. And his prize example is exactly that of the Homeric Greeks and their alleged difference from us. But if that difference is illusory, as Irwin argues, then the example fails and the virtue, or indeed the necessity, of comparing our own ways of thought with those found in ancient history totters with it.

Chappell makes a more local charge, that Williams misunderstands Homer and Aeschylus as they describe Agamemnon’s terrible decision to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, for his campaign against Troy to get under way. For Williams, Agamemnon is in a classical dilemma, in that whichever course he takes, he will do something terrible. For if he doesn’t perform the sacrifice he will fail in his duty as the commander of the naval and military forces he has mustered to avenge the slight offered to his brother, Menelaus, by the Trojan prince Paris’s abduction of Helen.

On this account there are two equally onerous duties, so whichever way Agamemnon decides he will do something terrible. But Chappell argues convincingly that Homer and Aeschylus do not present it like that. Instead, Agamemnon is a brutal thug, so dazzled by the prospect of military glory, rape and booty that he bulldozes over the absolute impropriety of sacrificing his own daughter. Williams does, of course, have other examples of genuine dilemmas, notably that of Sophie’s choice (from William Styron’s 1979 novel of the same name) but it is a mistake to shoehorn the classical work into the service of that discussion.

Another of Williams’s signature views is the distinction between what he calls the history of ideas and the history of philosophy. In the history of ideas the focus is what they, meaning the author and his or her contemporaries, thought, whereas in the history of philosophy, or philosophy done with an historical infusion, the focus is on what use we, here and now, can make of those ideas or their descendants. The distinction seems clear enough at first sight, but there is a problem in the offing.

The Oxford thinker R G Collingwood, whom Williams greatly admired, distinguished mere chronicles from history proper. A chronicle describes only the ‘surface’ of events, such as their dates or locations. A history, on the other hand, goes ‘inside’ the events, describing the intentions, plans, hopes, desires and fears that animated them. Hence Collingwood’s aphorism that ‘all history is the history of thought’.

Collingwood also thought that our identification of the thoughts of another subject, whether distant from us in historical time or standing next door, involved a re-enactment of the same thoughts ourselves. We interpret what he or she thinks by coming to see what he or she must have thought, to behave as they did or speak as they did in their circumstances.

These make Williams’s distinction between history of ideas and history of philosophy more problematic. The history of ideas clearly only gets started if it can identify the ideas of which it talks, but if it is doing so (for us, now) involves our rethinking or reenacting the very same ideas then this puts the historian into the same bracket as the philosopher. Both the historian and the philosopher need to do what they can to understand what went on, in their own, present-day terms. Two authors here (Giuseppina D’Oro and James Connelly) say that Williams and Collingwood stand shoulder to shoulder in opposing the ‘presentist orthodoxy’ that ‘the past can only be understood from the perspective of the present’. But there is no false doctrine of presentism in the case. The present is only privileged because it is the time when we, here and now, are doing the reconstruction or reenactment. It would, obviously, be wrong to pretend that others at different times and places cannot try to do the same reenactment, but nobody thinks that. Whether at other times interpreters will have the same sense of what was going on in the same past cannot be guessed. Meanwhile, we must stick with what we, with our own perspective, can do.

When their surroundings were different, thoughts that people in the past had about elements in those surroundings would have been different, too and we can understand how. The Greek idea of a ship was that of a bireme or trireme, not of a steamboat. But philosophy does not typically deal with elements of the thinkers’ environments. Insofar as it is independent of those, we can predict that less will be changed by remembering history. It is in this sense that our philosophy of mathematics identifies ideas belonging to the Greeks and to ourselves. Similarly, Aldous Huxley could talk of a perennial philosophy, a transhistorical concern with the same religious and spiritual themes. The natural exception to this abstraction arises when a philosophy is concerned with potentially changeable social and political environments, and then social and political context matters. Williams may well have had such thinking in mind when he brought historicity to the fore. But then the importance of history is more or less self-evident: just as we can only think of Themistocles’s plans at the battle of Salamis if we know the kinds of ship he had at his disposal, so we can only understand French eighteenth century demands for liberty if we know which liberties they had been denied.

Although he was known primarily as a moral philosopher, from the beginning of his career Williams spread his net further. One of his first books was on Descartes and in the last decade of his life his work revolved around Friedrich Nietzsche. From Nietzsche Williams took the idea of a ‘genealogy’ as a way of understanding concepts through being able to sketch their evolution. A salient example, due to Edward Craig, is to approach the concept of knowledge by understanding basic human needs and the role of attributions of knowledge in meeting them. Thus we need to benefit from what we are told by others, since we cannot be everywhere at the same time. Others may have seen where the predators or prey went, and we need to learn such things by being told of them. But fully to benefit we also need to have a grasp of the trustworthiness of our informants. Shaky informants may be guessing but the gold standard will be sources who know whatever they are telling us about. The concept of knowledge thereby gains a foothold. It functions to grade sources of information. In his book Knowledge and the State of Nature Craig demonstrates the insight to be gained from this approach, compared with the more traditional search for an ‘analysis’ of knowledge in terms such as ‘justified true belief’. These always meet counterexamples, and the identification of the function of the concept shows why. There are cases of first-class information that do not conform to the analytic conditions, and the opposite cases where the conditions are met but the function is not served.

The idea of such an evolutionary story is that it should start from some primitive state in which a concept is lacking, and seize on the function that it can serve, thereby making its existence intelligible. Several of the papers in this volume ask whether such accounts need to be historically true, or whether they are allowed a fictional element, and if so when and how much. There is also a scholarly question of how well Nietzsche’s famous genealogy of morals conforms to the pattern (possibly not much).

In his final book, Truth and Truthfulness, Williams undertook the ambitious task of finding a genealogy, not so much of the idea of truth itself, but of the virtues associated with being truthful: accuracy and sincerity. Accuracy means taking care that you know whereof you speak, and sincerity is a disposition to present it as you take it to be. Accuracy and sincerity become prized as people learn how much they depend upon the trustworthiness of others. It is difficult to mount a genealogy of truth itself, since it would require starting from a state of nature in which it is absent or at any rate only embryonic. But that is hard to do: the notion of truth is bound up with other notions like belief, and a state in which people do not have beliefs is close to a state without people at all, but perhaps with hominid ancestors. Any story about how we got from there to here must be entirely conjectural. But the ways in which we evolve to value accuracy and sincerity are more manageable, since we can give ourselves a very rich idea of their absence. We only have to open our smartphones to learn what interactions are like when people testify to things without fearing the negative reputational effects of failing in either accuracy or sincerity. The tech companies regard such failings as trivial compared with the all-important business of generating revenue, which is better done by stirring up conflict and controversy, just as politicians throw accuracy and sincerity to the winds when votes can be collected by cheaper means.

Analytic philosophy has often been charged with failings, such as being concerned with trivia or lacking a practical point. Williams was an inspiring refutation of such charges. He always dealt with profound human issues and always with an eye to strengthening the resources to deal with them. It is good that many philosophers still salute his memory. He deserved volumes such as this.

Simon Blackburn is a fellow of Trinity College and former Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His publications include ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy’, ‘Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love’ and ‘Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed’.