Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History

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, 2025).

• Part I: Introduction Adrian W. Moore: Foreword: Williams on Philosophy, History, and History of Philosophy 1: Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz: Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically Part II: Antiquity 2: Terence H. Irwin: Psychology, Ethics, and 'Ethicized Psychology': Bernard Williams on Greek Thought and Greek Philosophy 3: Sophie Grace Chappell: Agamemnon at Aulis: A Misfiring Example in Williams 4: Catherine Rowett: Bernard Williams on Truth and Plato's Republic on Justice: What Are Genealogical Arguments Good For? 5: Marcel van Ackeren: The Invention of the Humanistic Discipline: Williams on Plato on Philosophy Part III: Enlightenment  6: John Cottingham: Pure Enquiry, the Absolute Conception, and Convergence: Bernard Williams in Dialogue with Descartes 7: Gerald Lang: Getting Round the Cartesian Circle 8: Lorenzo Greco: A Humean Williams and a Williamsian Hume 9: Paul Russell: Recasting Responsibility: Hume and Williams 10: Carla Bagnoli: The Predicament of Temporality: Williams's Challenges to Kant's Practical Reason Part IV: Modernity  11: P. J. E. Kail: Genealogy: Williams, Hume, and Nietzsche 12: David Owen: Ethics, Untimeliness, and Redlichkeit: On the Character of Williams's Relationship to Nietzsche 13: Giuseppina D'Oro and James Connelly: The Sense of the Past: Williams and Collingwood on Humanistic and Scientific Knowledge 14: Matthieu Queloz and Nikhil Krishnan: Williams's Debt to Wittgenstein Part V: Methodology and the History of Philosophy 15: John Marenbon: Why Bernard Williams Is a Bad Example for Historians of Philosophy 16: Ralph Wedgwood: The Iniquity of Oblivion 17: Garrett Cullity: Williams, Berlin, and the Vindication Problem Part VI: History and Genealogy 18: Hans-Johann Glock: Serpents in the Genealogical Garden of Eden: Why Williams's Genealogy Is Excessively Historicist and Insufficiently Historical 19: Ng Geraldine: Internal Reasons and Historical Thinking 20: Ilaria Cozzaglio and Amanda R. Greene: The Art of the Possible: Williams on Political Judgement and the Historical Perspective 21: Miranda Fricker: A Project of 'Impure' Enquiry: Williams's Historical Self-Consciousness