HE WAS known primarily as a philosopher, which is what he did professionally. I think he was quite a good philosopher, though I am not, of course, in a position to judge his work the way a philosophy professor might have judged it. But then one of Bernard Williams’ beliefs—and one I have come to share, in part because of his influence—was that a philosophy which spoke only to the academy was not of much use.
I have had to rephrase that last sentence a number of times in my own mind before arriving at something I thought would be acceptable to Bernard. He is still, in other words, looking over my shoulder when I make assertions. (Not that he ever did that in real life: it is an imagined Bernard, derived from his writing, who has always performed that task for me.) One of the things he always objected to was the way moral philosophy tried to insist on dictating “should” or “ought”—tried to convert everything that mattered into a moral obligation. So I am not able to say what be doing or even what it , since that would be a very un-Bernard-like formulation. And the way an idea was formulated in language was, for him, at the heart of his philosophical enterprise.
