Julius Silver Professor, New York University
“D’ou venons nous?…”: Origins in the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams
Lecture I
Monday, April 5, 2027
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Lecture II
Tuesday, April 6, 2027
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Lecture III – Seminar and Discussion
Wednesday, April 7, 2027
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
About Miranda Fricker
Miranda Fricker is Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU, and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. Her work is mainly in Moral Philosophy and Social Epistemology, with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007); co-author and editor of Reading Ethics (2009); co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (2019), The Epistemic Life of Groups (2016); and The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (2000). She was Director of the Mind Association, which oversees the philosophy journal MIND, from 2010-2015; Assistant Editor of the Journal of the APA from 2014-2020; and since 2015 has served as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is a Corresponding Member of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
About these lectures
These lectures will explore origins in Williams ethical philosophy, in two related senses of ‘origin’. The first is the sense germane to the interpretive enterprise of tracing a thinker’s personal intellectual trajectory back to starting conceptions which can fruitfully be represented as guiding it throughout. In this regard, the thesis advanced in the first lecture will be that the ethical sensibility to which his 1993 book, Shame and Necessity, is a complex tribute—that of ancient Greek culture—is key to understanding much of the rest of Williams’ work in moral philosophy, both before and after 1993.
The second sense of ‘origin’ to be explored is a distinctively theoretical one—the idea of an origin that is at work in State of Nature methodology. This kind of origin is normally regarded as quite at odds with a historical genealogical method, and yet in his 2002 book Truth and Truthfulness, Williams combined the two into a single integrated enquiry. The thesis of this second lecture will be that this peculiar combination of methods reflects Williams’ conception of philosophy’s relation to history quite generally. According to that conception, our philosophical thought can, and should, identify origins in minimal yet somewhat determinative necessities of human social life discernible from the armchair; but, if it is not to exclude itself from relevance by settling into a permanent sedentary posture, philosophy must soon stand up to ‘mix’ itself with the contingencies of history.
About the Commentators
Stefanos Geroulanos
Professor of History, Executive Director of Remarque Institute
New York University
Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (2024) and another four books on history of medicine and French philosophy. He serves as a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Adrian William Moore
Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy
University of Oxford
A.W. Moore is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His publications include: The Infinite (3rd edn, 2019); Points of View (OUP, 1997); Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (2003); The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2012); and Gödel’s Theorem: A Very Short Introduction (2022). He has edited or co-edited four volumes of essays, including Bernard Williams’ Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006). He also has two volumes of his own essays: Language, World, and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics (2019); and The Human A Priori: How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics (2023). Since 2003 he has been one of Bernard Williams’ literary executors. From 2014 to 2024 he was Philosophy Delegate at Oxford University Press, and from 2015 to 2025 he was Joint Editor, with Lucy O’Brien, of MIND. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Susan Wolf
Professor Emerita, Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emerita, where she taught from 2002 till 2022. She received her B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from Yale University in 1974, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978.
Wolf was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. Wolf works chiefly in ethics and its close relations in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Her interests range widely over moral psychology, value theory, and normative ethics. She has made contributions to our understanding of the nature and plurality of value, the importance of moral virtue, the possibility of freedom and responsibility in a deterministic world, and the pursuit of meaning in life. Some of her most notable works include “Moral Saints”, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford, 1990), Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton, 2010), and The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (Oxford, 2015).
Wheelchair accessible and service dogs welcome. For disability-related accommodation, email [email protected] or call 510-643-9164 five days in advance of the lecture.