Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History

For Bernard Williams, philosophy and history are importantly connected. His work exploits this connection in a number of directions: he believes that philosophy cannot ignore its own history the way science can; that even when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one needs to draw on philosophy; and that when doing the history of philosophy primarily to produce philosophy, one still needs a sense of how historically distant past philosophers are, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. But Williams also holds that systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not just with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand.

To explore these different ways in which philosophy and history intertwine, this volume assembles specially commissioned contributions by A. W. Moore, Terence Irwin, Sophie-Grace Chappell, Catherine Rowett, Marcel van Ackeren, John Cottingham, Gerald Lang, Lorenzo Greco, Paul Russell, Carla Bagnoli, Peter Kail, David Owen, Giuseppina D’Oro, James Connelly, Matthieu Queloz, Nikhil Krishnan, John Marenbon, Ralph Wedgwood, Garrett Cullity, Hans-Johann Glock, Geraldine Ng, Ilaria Cozzaglio, Amanda R. Greene, and Miranda Fricker. They critically appraise Williams’s work in and on the history of philosophy as well as his ’historicist turn’ and his use of genealogy.

The collection uniquely combines substantive discussions of historical figures from Homer to Wittgenstein with methodological discussions of how and why the history of philosophy should be done, and how and why philosophy should draw on history.

Marcel van Ackeren, Senior Lecturer, Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Wuerzburg and Research Associate, The Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford, Matthieu Queloz, Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Bern

Marcel van Ackeren is Senior Lecturer for Ethics at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at University of Wuerzburg and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. He worked as a Henkel Fellow/Research Associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and has held Fellowships and Positions at the Centre for Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Bioethics (Muenster). He also is Associate Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford where he started to work as a philosopher conducting doctoral research supervised by B. Williams and M. Frede.

Matthieu Queloz is an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern. Before that, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford for three years. In 2022, he was awarded the Amerbach Prize from the University of Basel as well as the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers from the Lauener Foundation for Analytical Philosophy. He is the author of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (OUP, 2021) and The Ethics of Conceptualization: A Needs-Based Approach (OUP 2024).