ABSTRACT
The essay that follows proceeds with a certain indirection.1 Although I mean to present the view that Bernard Williams-rightly-found literature to exemplify insights that were crucial to his philosophical views, my discussion of his philosophical uses of literature does not become prominent until the midpoint of the essay. In pursuing this indirect course, I am trying to honor the track of Williams’ own development. My sense is that Williams developed certain key positions with fairly limited direct reliance on literature:
1 This distinction between morality, conceived as a separate field of activity that continually aimed to become systematic, principled, generalized, progressive, and ethics, conceived as a range of activity that embraced the moral and the amoral, the things that one had seriously undertaken in the intention of doing good and the things that one discovered, almost after the fact, that one was involved in, whether with maximal or minimal fault of one’s own.
