Historiography
5 writings
Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History
Edited with Marcel van Ackeren. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.001.0001
For Bernard Williams, philosophy and history are importantly connected. His work exploits this connection in a number of directions: he believes that philosophy cannot ignore its own history the way science can; that even when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one needs to draw on philosophy; and that when doing the history of philosophy primarily to produce philosophy, one still needs a sense of how historically distant past philosophers are, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. But Williams also holds that systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not just with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand. To explore these different ways in which philosophy and history intertwine, this volume assembles specially commissioned contributions by A. W. Moore, Terence Irwin, Sophie Grace Chappell, Catherine Rowett, Marcel van Ackeren, John Cottingham, Gerald Lang, Lorenzo Greco, Paul Russell, Carla Bagnoli, Peter Kail, David Owen, Giuseppina D’Oro, James Connelly, Matthieu Queloz, Nikhil Krishnan, John Marenbon, Ralph Wedgwood, Garrett Cullity, Hans-Johann Glock, Geraldine Ng, Ilaria Cozzaglio, Amanda R. Greene, and Miranda Fricker. They critically appraise Williams’s work in and on the history of philosophy as well as his ‘historicist turn’ and his use of genealogy. The resulting collection uniquely combines substantive discussions of historical figures from Homer to Wittgenstein with methodological discussions of how and why the history of philosophy should be done, and how and why philosophy should draw on history.
View Book
Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically
With Marcel van Ackeren. In Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz (eds.), 14–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780191966361.003.0003
Distinguishes four different connections between philosophy and history. (1) Philosophy cannot ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) When engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still has to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically—that is, primarily to produce philosophy—requires a keen sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, because the point of reading them is to confront something different from the present. (4) Systematic philosophy itself needs to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it seeks to understand.
Download PDF
Making Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons. Sandra Lapointe and Erich Reck (eds.), 171–191. New York: Routledge. 2023. doi:10.4324/9781003184294-9
Instead of treating Hobbes and Hume as answering the same questions we ask today, this article proposes that we start from the practical predicaments their political concepts addressed in their own time. Hume’s account of property and Hobbes’s account of sovereign power are reconstructed as historically local, yet structurally revealing, responses to predicaments—over conflict, security, and cooperation—that still structure our political life.
Download PDF
Theorizing the Normative Significance of Critical Histories for International Law
Journal of the History of International Law 24 (4): 561–587. 2022. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1163/15718050-12340207
Addresses the question of whether the tainted history of international law should affect our present-day evaluation of it. It argues that critical histories derive their power in three primary ways: by subverting the historical claims that support a practice’s authority, by failing to meet the normative expectations readers bring to the past, and by tracing the functional continuities that link past problems to the present. The framework explains how history can be normatively significant even when its direct influence on legal argument is unclear.
Download PDF
Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy
Studia Philosophica 76: 137–52. 2017. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2017.76008
Develops Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline.
Download PDF