Bernard Williams is considered by distinguished contemporaries from many fields as one of the great, inspirational humanists of his time. Aside from his terrifying brilliance, his dazzling speed of mind and extraordinary range of understanding, his zest, and his glittering wit, he was also admired for the deep humanity that had infused his life and work, and the seriousness with which he had tried to transform the role of the moral philosopher. The paradoxical combination of exhilaration and pessimism, of complete facility in the academic exercises of philosophy juxtaposed with an almost...

Bernard Williams is considered by distinguished contemporaries from many fields as one of the great, inspirational humanists of his time. Aside from his terrifying brilliance, his dazzling speed of mind and extraordinary range of understanding, his zest, and his glittering wit, he was also admired for the deep humanity that had infused his life and work, and the seriousness with which he had tried to transform the role of the moral philosopher. The paradoxical combination of exhilaration and pessimism, of complete facility in the academic exercises of philosophy juxtaposed with an almost tragic sense of the resistance that the human clay offers to theory and analysis, let alone to recipes and panaceas, made Williams a unique, and uniquely admired, figure in his generation.