Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche

Abstract

Abstract Bernard Williams was one of just two prominent figures within the mainstream of Anglophone moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth-century to devote serious attention to Nietzsche. (Philippa Foot was the other comparably famous figure to do so, and she, unsurprisingly, shared with Williams skepticism about many orthodoxies of analytic moral philosophy during this time.) The author’s aim is to assess the Williams–Nietzsche relationship, the extent to which Williams learned from Nietzsche, and the extent to which he retreated from or ignored Nietzsche’s actual views. The author argues that the alleged influence is mostly superficial and that Williams’s limited engagement with Nietzsche tells us something about the distinctive and conservative nature of Anglophone philosophy over the past century. The author focuses mainly on Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993), as well as some of Williams’s articles.