History and Tragedy in Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action and in Bernard Williams, c. 1959–1973

In recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarship on Bernard Williams’ work. The present paper does not seek to add, at least not directly, to our understanding of Williams. Rather, it is an attempt to see some of the now well-trodden paths of Williams’ thought in terms of the concerns of his friend at All Souls, Stuart Hampshire. Only very little work of this kind has been attempted. In particular, Williams’ sense that ethics is to sit at the feet of history and, whilst resisting relativism, to proceed in a self-consciously tragic tone, can be thought of as in conversation with Hampshire’s arguments. Doing ethics after Wittgenstein and Ryle, Hampshire was a very early exponent of an anti-Cartesian theory of mind, which, unlike the work of Anscombe, took the new Aristotelianism to war against too systematic a picture of virtue. Hampshire was attempting to make us skeptical of merely received, historically unselfconscious ethical conventions. He sought to dislodge the confidence that moral dilemmas were merely logical errors, through the disturbing medicine of conflicting possible conventions found in history and literature. In this, he is an important precursor to Williams’ thought.