Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
Isn't It the Truth?
By Colin McGinn
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy
by Bernard Williams
Princeton University Press,328 pp., $27.95
Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. He might be described as an analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist. Notably sharp-minded and dialectically skilled, he is also impressively learned in history, classical scholarship, literature, politics, and music. He opposes the widespread contemporary desire to model philosophy on science, preferring to locate philosophy within its historical and cultural context; there are other ways to be intellectually serious than by aping the physicists. His interests have focused on ethics, in which he has contested the rationalist and universalist claims of both Kantianism and utilitarianism—though he has also written a first-rate book on Descartes and pioneered in the discussion of personal identity. He possesses a mind that is both flexible and muscular: open and imaginative on the one hand, rigorous and no-nonsense (and occasionally stinging) on the other. No one else can lance an opponent with a comparable twinkle in his eye. The phrase 'withering wit' is unavoidable when witnessing Williams in action.
Review, 4306 words
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