TNR About Bernard Williams

The TNR book review section gushes all over Bernard Williams (the philosopher, not the football player).

This is what I mean when I use the term 'gush:'

"When Bernard Williams died, in 2003, the loss was felt well beyond the refined world of academic philosophy. In a succession of obituaries and affectionate memorial events at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley, distinguished contemporaries from many fields testified to the inspiration he had given them. All spoke of his terrifying brilliance, his dazzling speed of mind and extraordinary range of understanding, his zest and his glittering wit."

Except, uh, Williams was an idiot. I read his facile and paper-thin philosophy as a freshman, in Philosophy 202. My preceptor (who was named Elijah, no joke) could have written the line I quoted from the TNR. And every precept the 19-year-old Styx would tear William's arguments into individual twizzler pieces. Elijah didn't like that.

My counter-Williams insurgency taught me two things that have kept with me till today:

1. I am a halfway decent philosopher,
2. Moral philosophy should not be taught in University.
   

Philosophy is about thinking on your own, not about what well-credentialed idiots have to say. If you are right, and they are wrong, the ideas should stand on their own. Philosophy lives and dies every moment of every day. It lives whenever and wherever there is still the unknown or unknowable; it dies when it's replaced by science.

Remember this about Williams, and academic philosophy. Moral Philosophy, as it's taught in grand academic centers, is on a lower level of sophistication than a High School Yeshiva mussar schmooze.

No surprise, I guess.