Simon Blackburn at the Dublin Review of Books:
Bernard Williams is universally acknowledged as a great humanist and one of the major philosophers of his time. Since his death in 2003 there has been a continuous stream of books on his work, of which this large volume is the latest. This is unusual in academic philosophy; there is normally a period in which people draw breath before revisiting even those thinkers who continue to deserve attention.
Part of the explanation is the sheer scope of his work. After the introduction this volume partitions its twenty-two contributors into five sections: Antiquity, Enlightenment, Modernity, Methodology and the History of Philosophy, and History and Genealogy. A full explanation would also cite the attractive nature of Williams’s writing and conversation. As Miranda Fricker nicely puts it, his ‘thinking and conversation and writing were somehow essentially animated: agile, funny, erudite, candid, rather free with delicious anecdote or ironical comment’. His conversation was delightful, although his writing can prompt puzzlement or even irritation – no sooner has he jumped one fence then he is off to the next one that has captured his interest. He repays reading but resists pigeonholing, refusing to be pinned down, or to defend one or another of the many ‘isms’ (realism, idealism, historicism, empiricism, relativism that give the bearings usually used to categorise philosophers).
more here.
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