Princeton University Press

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the loosely related jihadi Islamist terrorist attacks that followed in a dozen countries, have left the world more afraid than ever of Islam. Modern terrorism is not the only factor. The West has long had a problem with Islam. This perception dates back a full millennium to a time when Europe was in its dark ages and Islamic civilisation was blossoming. From the beginning, Western anxiety about Islam has been based on almost total ignorance. Well before there was any substantial contact between Europeans and Muslims, Islam was an imagined ‘other’ automatically cast as the opposite of everything that the ‘Christian West’ claimed as its legacy.

Bernard Williams began his philosophical life as the enfant terrible of mainstream English philosophy. In 2003 he died its most eminent contemporary figure. Williams was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1990 to 1996, and a professor at Berkeley from 1988 until his death. Both these books are collections of essays, nearly all published previously, but many not easily accessible. In addition to three general essays about classical Greek philosophy, The Sense of the Past has essays on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; and then on Descartes, Hume, Henry Sidgwick, Nietzsche, R.G. Collingwood, and Wittgenstein. The essays in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline are collected under the headings of ‘Metaphysics and Epistemology’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘The Scope and Limits of Philosophy’. In both volumes, the essays range across Williams’s philosophical life, affording a picture both of his recurring preoccupations and of the evolution of his concerns.