Bernard Williams’ philosophy is shaped by a distinctive and abiding interest in the borderlands between Philosophy and History. He famously considers moral philosophy, and particularly moral theory, to over‐step the border that marks the real ‘limits’ of the discipline, and in his later work he explicitly advances the idea of doing ‘impure’ philosophy, by which he meant philosophy that mixed itself with history. By examining the complex impression left on Williams’ historical self‐consciousness by his engagements with two very different figures (...) in the history of philosophy, namely Descartes and Wittgenstein, I will explore a number of ways in which philosophy and history are closely intertwined for Williams. This will draw out the positive vision he modelled for us of ‘impure’ philosophy—a philosophical style he took to contribute to nurturing philosophy as a humanistic discipline. (shrink)

As a response to what I see as the challenge posed by constructivist and narrative pedagogies, this paper seeks to sympathetically reconstruct Bernard Williams’ Absolute Conception from the scattered texts in which he briefly sketched it While ultimately defending the Absolute Conception or something close enough to it, the paper criticizes and distances itself from some aspects of Williams’ version, notably his conception of philosophy as insurmountably perspectival. Williams’ understanding of perspectival knowledge as contrasted to absolute knowledge is illustrated with (...) the concrete, if fictional case of the Dr Manhattan character from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Adrian Moore’s reading, and Hilary Putnam’s criticisms of Williams’ Absolute Conception are amongst the positions engaged with. (shrink)

This essay appeared as a contribution to a special issue of European Journal of Philosophy to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense. In that book Strawson asks whether we should agree with Kant's claim, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that there can be only one world. What Kant means by this claim is that the four-dimensional realm that we inhabit must constitute the whole of empirical reality. Strawson gives reasons for (...) challenging this claim. This essay raises the question whether, even if Strawson is right, we may nevertheless have reason to believe that there can be only one world on a broader understanding of ‘world’. The aim is as much to clarify the issue as to settle it, although an attempt is made to motivate the view that there can indeed be only one world on this broader understanding. (shrink)