Williams' ‘Philosophical Anthropology’: A Humean and Nietzschean Synergy

Abstract This paper explores the synergy of Humean and Nietzschean positive and negative energies in Williams ethical philosophy. The discussion concentrates attention somewhat on Truth and Truthfulness , the book in which Williams developed his innovatively hybrid philosophical method—that of State of Nature Genealogy. This distinctive combination of naturalism and historicism concentrates the Humean and Nietzschean influences into a philosophical structure that separates the basic practically necessary features of human social life, such as the proto virtue of truthfulness, from its culturally realized forms, which are irreducibly historical and contingent. A key feature of the overall exegetical thesis is that while Nietzsche increasingly gained explicit emphasis in Williams' work as time went on, the essential combination of stabilizing and destabilizing, naturalistic and historicist, impulses remained a constant.