According to Bernard Williams, philosophy is a ‘humanistic' discipline when it is dedicated to helping us make the best sense of our lives, and to do this philosophy must turn to history and to the development of our self-understanding over time. In this paper I follow Williams’ humanistic methodology by considering another kind of history and the way it informs our present self-understanding, both as persons and as philosophers. I am concerned with youth or adolescence as a kind of history with which we must try to come to terms. Looking to the Western philosophy’s origin story, of Socrates corrupting the youth, to D.W Winnicott’s writings on youth, and Williams’ own writing on shame, I ask: if we conceive of youth as a kind of history, what is involved in coming to terms with, and living well with the past of our youth, and how might reflection on youth be part of philosophy, humanistically conceived?

In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, Bernard Williams argued that philosophy has a distinctive relationship with history, and not just the history of philosophy. He had in mind, especially, moral and political thought. For Williams, changes in ethical outlook are typically driven by social and cultural forces distinct from the power of rational argument. When an ethical idea prevails over time, holders of the outlook it supplants often have ‘have [no] reason to recognize the transition as an improvement’ (Williams 2000: 486). By their lights, the arguments for change are question-begging. In this respect, Williams believed, the history of ethics is unlike the history of modern science, whose telling typically vindicates later scientists on terms compelling to their predecessors.

I discuss three lines of thought that appear in Williams’s ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’: the idea of science as pursuing an ‘absolute conception’ of the world, the idea that ‘there is no conception of the world that is not conceptualised in some way or other’, and the idea of ‘making sense of ourselves’. I consider whether the possibility of ‘making sense of ourselves’ fits with the idea of science as providing an ‘absolute conception of the world’, and I conclude that it does not.

One of Bernard Williams’ abiding aims was to reassure us in the face of what I call ‘genealogical anxiety’: the anxiety that once our cherished beliefs, concepts, values and practices have their origins revealed, we will be rationally compelled to abandon them. Williams’ treatment of genealogical anxiety rests on a deep distinction between science and ethics: while ‘our’ scientific outlook can be ‘vindicated’ by its history, ‘our’ ethical-political outlook cannot. In so arguing, Williams fails to reckon with the full force of genealogical anxiety and the problem of contingency that provokes it; he is guilty, ironically, of a kind of scientism about the natural sciences, seeing them as a form of inquiry free from historically contingent perspective. To make my case, I turn to On Certainty, in which Wittgenstein presents the Euromodern scientific outlook as no less susceptible of genealogical anxiety than any other. What’s more, Wittgenstein takes seriously a reply to genealogical anxiety – an externalist reply – that Williams dismisses as a ‘thin tune’ not ‘worth whistling’. If Wittgenstein is right that scientific and ethical outlooks are equally susceptible of genealogical critique, then it may well turn out that this ‘thin tune’ is the only one we have available to whistle.

Why do academic philosophy in times like these? I present a reading of Bernard Williams’ conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline alongside his reflections on humanistic inquiry more generally, guided by the concern that during times of deep social and political crisis, academic philosophy is not worth doing. Given those circumstances, one might - and should - wonder if it is anything other than a distraction, an evasion of political responsibility, or a decadent frivolity. I present this reading in light of Roger Scruton’s criticism in 1995 that though Williams was “the most prominent” British ethicist of the time, his work lacks substantive ethical content. Given Williams’ response to Scruton, my reading will emphasize two things: first, that Williams’ conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline reveals why the substance of his ethical thought is typically presented in an indirect and oblique manner. Second, that by reading Williams with this in mind, one can reconstruct from his later work a way of answering the question I began with. Philosophy, understood in a certain way and given certain historically contingent social and institutional conditions, can express and reflect the values of the outlook he held and which we may be losing: it may manifest a distinctively liberal form of freedom inseparable from the value of truthfulness.

In their work Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim rarely encounter each other as philosophers, but they are, I argue, in a silent interlocution that can be articulated through Stanley Cavell’s reflections on philosophy and psychoanalysis (Cavell 1987). Cavell urged the renewal of philosophy as a humanistic discipline through a rapprochement of philosophy and psychoanalysis. In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ Williams articulated his long-held view of philosophy as a discipline of reflective enquiry aimed at self-knowledge. This paper explores how Richard Wollheim’s philosophical deployment of psychoanalytic theses owed to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein can supply a real, bodily, basis for the form of critical self-knowledge on which Williams insisted.

Sometimes our scientific advances demonstrate that our ordinary way of speaking about the world is wrong. Sometimes, however, they show exactly how our ordinary descriptions get things right.

In this paper, I give a framework for working out which of the two cases we are in. I suggest we think about how science can reveal indeterminacy in our ordinary language. When this occurs, we should respond by thinking about what we want our ordinary talk to do for us. As a case study, I’ll examine the exchange between Arthur Eddington and Susan Stebbing regarding the significance of the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom for our ordinary solidity judgements.

The major consequence of this proposal is that it requires us to reflect on ourselves and our lives as well as the world. To determine whether our ordinary talk is proven wrong by science we must think about what we want to do with our everyday speech. This requires taking a leaf out of Bernard Williams’ book. Namely, it requires doing philosophy as a humanistic discipline.

For Bernard Williams, ethical inquiry is fundamentally about sense-making: it starts from what we already care about, and is always local. As a result, Williams opposes scientistic models of philosophy, arguing that philosophy should be seen as ‘part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities’. This paper critiques the assumptions about disciplinarity on which Williams’s argument is based, and uses some resources from Dewey’s pragmatism to propose some friendly amendments to Williams’s account of the nature of value inquiry. Rather than seeking to assign philosophy either to the humanities or the sciences, it is more fruitful to examine philosophy through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies and how to reconcile them, are central. What is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.