Philosophy at 100: a special issue for Bernard Williams

The British journal Philosophy is completing its hundredth year in print. It marks the anniversary with a special issue devoted to an article published in its own pages a quarter of a century ago: Bernard Williams's "Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline".

Williams's question#

Williams's essay is short but bold. What it asks is this: is philosophy a science?

For much of the twentieth century, the implicit model of analytic philosophy was science. Philosophy was imagined as a discipline that progresses like physics, solves its problems and accumulates results.

Williams objects to that model. Philosophy, on his account, belongs to the same family as history and the humanities rather than to science. The reason is that our philosophical concepts — freedom, responsibility, justice, the self — are historically formed. To understand them is to understand how they came to be.

In science the past is usually a stage that has been superseded; nobody has to read Aristotle to understand present-day physics. In philosophy, Plato is still an interlocutor.

The charge of scientism#

Williams's position is a warning against the call for philosophy to model itself on science. When philosophy imitates science, he argues, it loses twice over: it cannot be as precise as science, and it abandons its own proper work — contributing to the human effort at self-understanding.

The argument is still live. On one side: experimental philosophy, naturalised epistemology and a philosophy of mind working closely with cognitive science. On the other: approaches that lean on conceptual history, literature and phenomenology.

A hundred-year-old journal#

Philosophy has been published since 1925 and is among the oldest philosophy journals in English. In an era of proliferating specialist titles, it is one of the few that still addresses a general philosophical readership.

Marking its centenary by returning to a text from its own past fits that line. As Williams said, in philosophy the past is not superseded; it is read again.