"Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline" by Bernard Williams, in The Threepenny Review (Spring 2001), P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, Calif. 94709.

Philosophy has become so recondite and airless an occupation these days that the very title of Williams’s essay may seem a reproach. Williams, who teaches philosophy at Oxford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Shame and Necessity (1993), among many other books, regrets that students too often end up believing that philosophy is "a self-contained technical subject." He believes that philosophy should rather be "part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves." If it is to do that, philosophy needs to rid itself of what Williams calls "scientistic illusions." It should not try to behave like a branch of the natural sciences, except in those cases where that is precisely what it is— "work in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, for instance, or in the more technical aspects of logic." Philosophy must certainly take an interest in the sciences, but without being assimilated "to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences."

Philosophy, for Williams, belongs to an expansive humanistic enterprise. If philosophy is to contribute successfully to that process of understanding ourselves and our activities, it must attend to all the other parts of the enterprise, especially history: "If we believe that philosophy might play an important part in making people think about what they are doing, then philosophy should acknowledge its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves, and if it insists on not doing so, it may seem to the student in every sense quite peculiar."

Williams acknowledges the reservations that someone, "perhaps a young philosopher," will have about the encompassing approach he proposes: "Doesn’t it mean that there is too much we need to know, that one can only do philosophy by being an amateur of altogether too much? Can’t we just get on with it?" In other words, isn’t small and good, the successful approach of much contemporary analytic philosophy, better than broad and bad?

Williams argues that philosophy should not abandon an approach that allows for the division of labor, but that it should reconsider the nature of the division, which "tends to be modeled too easily on that of the sciences, as dividing one field or area of theorizing from another." He proposes that the subject be divided up differently—"by thinking of one given ethical idea, for instance, and the various considerations that might help one to understand it." And as for not knowing all that you think you might need to know before undertaking philosophy, "it makes a difference," he observes, "what it is that you know you do not know. One may not see very far outside one’s own house, but it can be very important which direction one is looking in."

Williams worries that the traditional commercial. He fears that reflective activity humanistic enterprise of trying to understand may be preserved, at best, "as part of the heritage ourselves is coming to seem odd, archaic, and industry." And if that should occur, "it will not unnecessary at a time when education is be the passionate and intelligent activity that it focused increasingly on the technical and the needs to be."