Princeton University Press

Bernard Williams began his philosophical life as the enfant terrible of mainstream English philosophy. In 2003 he died its most eminent contemporary figure. Williams was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1990 to 1996, and a professor at Berkeley from 1988 until his death. Both these books are collections of essays, nearly all published previously, but many not easily accessible. In addition to three general essays about classical Greek philosophy, The Sense of the Past has essays on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; and then on Descartes, Hume, Henry Sidgwick, Nietzsche, R.G. Collingwood, and Wittgenstein. The essays in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline are collected under the headings of ‘Metaphysics and Epistemology’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘The Scope and Limits of Philosophy’. In both volumes, the essays range across Williams’s philosophical life, affording a picture both of his recurring preoccupations and of the evolution of his concerns.

On a cold, grey day in February this year, economist Larry H. Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard. Though some undergraduates gathered in Harvard Yard to wave signs saying ‘Stay Summers Stay’, the rift with faculty and the governing board proved too much. Summers issued a dignified letter to the Harvard community, shook hands with well-wishers, and disappeared.

Fortunately, only a part of this book (the inferior part) attempts to take on the impossible task implied by its title and first sentence: the task of explaining how, or whether, the Modern Age is the Jewish Age. Nor, to its credit, does the book try to smother its failure in irony. It really means to take this task on. When it does so, particularly in the opening chapters, it lapses into obscurity and metaphor. The topic is too large for the author and is bound to escape him.