The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Saturday June 28, 2003:
The three Cambridge colleges which first admitted women in 1972 were King's, Clare and Churchill. In a previous clarification (below) we said the trio included Darwin college and omitted Churchill. Darwin is a graduate college which has been coeducational since its foundation in 1964.
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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday June 18 2003
In the obituary below we stated that Professor Williams was said to have been largely responsible for King's College being the first Cambridge college to admit women. King's College was not the first Cambridge college to admit women. Girton College (founded 1869) and Newnham College (founded 1871) were founded as women's colleges, as was New Hall (founded 1954) and Lucy Cavendish (founded 1965). Girton College now admits both women and men, while the others remain solely for women. Wolfson College (founded 1965) was established as a graduate and mixed college. Around the same time, Darwin College and Clare Hall, which are also graduate colleges, became mixed colleges after the university repealed its statute prohibiting mixed colleges. King's College was one of the first all-male colleges that was not specifically a graduate college to admit female students but it was one of three: King's, Clare and Darwin colleges all admitted women students in 1972.
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Professor Sir Bernard Williams, who has died aged 73, was arguably the greatest British philosopher of his era. He revivified moral philosophy, which had become moribund, and pioneered the current debates on personal identity and the self, and on the notion of equality.
Dazzlingly quick and devastating in discussion, he was famously able to summarise other people's arguments better than they could themselves, and anticipate an antagonist's objections to his objections - and, in turn, his objections to hers before she had even finished her sentence. Utterly rigorous, yet wonderfully non-academic, his philosophy is permeated by a distinctive philosophical voice - witty, erudite and humane - and by a sense of his own humorous and tragic view of life. He always, as one of his devoted ex-students observed, did philosophy as a whole human being.
Philosophers, Williams said, "repeatedly urge us to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, but for most human purposes that is not a good species to view it under". His honesty, subtlety and scepticism compelled him to eschew monolithic system-building, eluding labels and being labelled.
This has led some to query what exactly his contribution consists of, but they have simply missed the point. Wanting to find a new way of doing philosophy, Williams simultaneously exploited and undermined established philosophical boundaries. He deconstructed, as Derrida would do if he were cleverer and more pledged to truth. Exhuming moral philosophy from a no-man's-land of logical, ahistorical analysis, into a sort of moral anthropology, he saw moral codes and writings as essentially embedded in history and culture, and questioned the whole "peculiar institution" of morality, which he considered a particular (modern western) development of the ethical.
So nuanced is his treatment of moral relativism as to incur speculation over how far he himself was a relativist. But he also infuriated philosophers by applauding the Enlightenment aspiration to scientific objectivity and "the absolute conception of reality".
Urging the neglected claims of emotion, motivation and sheer luck in morality, the importance of "internal" as well as "external" reasons, Williams extended moral philosophy from an over-theorised obsession with moral obligation into the Hellenic latitude of ethics - living a whole life well. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism, usually seen as opposite moral theories, were equally his target, for each similarly claiming objective universality and a single calculable principle for morality. (Utilitarianism ceased to be the paradigm moral theory after his critique.)
Yet Williams was an iconoclast of iconoclasm: while previous great philosophers had each claimed to produce a method that would end philosophy in a generation, he revealed the folly of such attempts. Dedicated to pluralism, and to freeing philosophy from preconceptions, he focused exquisitely on the richness of how things actually are.
Williams was born in Westcliff, Essex, and educated at Chigwell school. While reading greats at Balliol College, Oxford, he was already a golden boy. Politics, philosophy and economics undergraduates, who fashionably scorned tutorials with the dons as a waste of time, gathered in the junior common room to take notes while their fellow student conducted impromptu seminars on philosophy. He concentrated on the philosophical side of greats, neglecting the historical element to such an extent that he claimed to need part of his history finals' time to learn history; he arrived 29 minutes late for the examination (any later would have been inadmissible) wearing a white magnolia buttonhole.
After graduating with congratulatory honours, Williams did his national service in the RAF - the year he spent flying Spitfires in Canada was, he sometimes said, the happiest in his life. He was reputedly a very skilled fighter pilot, and also loved driving fast cars. On his return to England, at the age of 22, he was elected a fellow at All Souls, but left Oxford for University College London, and subsequently Bedford College, mainly, it was said, in order to accommodate his politician wife, Shirley Williams, later Baroness Williams of Crosby.
They, and soon their daughter, lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, his wife, their four children and various lodgers, for what sounded like a halcyon 17 years, in which the only (ephemeral) friction was over what colour to paint the basement. Williams was a rivetting party guest, often causing a logjam round the fridge as the entire gathering struggled to get into the kitchen to hear him discussing metaphysics.
In 1972, Williams (by then Knightbridge professor at Cambridge) published his first book, Morality: An Introduction To Ethics. Excoriating the emptiness of moral philosophy as it was then practised, he diagnosed its "original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all." Using trivial or non-contentious illustrations, he argued in a radio talk, is fine in a branch of philosophy like the theory of knowledge, but not in moral philosophy, where "the category of the serious and the trivial is itself a moral category".
The following year, he brought out Problems Of The Self, a collection of papers, several of which had been written when he was in his 20s. Like the great David Hume, Williams conveyed an exhilarating and exhilarated sense of a young man thinking unhampered by preconceptions and formulae with a vertiginously free deftness.
In the same year, he also produced his critique of Utilitarianism, which contained two famous examples, now the subject of innumerable PhD theses. In one, he imagined a man, Jim, who finds himself in the central square of a small South American town, confronted by 20 trussed Indians. The captain who has quashed their rebellion declares that if Jim, as an honoured foreigner, kills one of them, the others will be allowed to go free; if he does not, they will all, as scheduled, die.
According to Utilitarianism, which considers the goodness of an action to reside in how much it increases the overall sum of happiness, there is no problem for Jim - he should simply kill one of them. But as Williams's illustration and argument showed, there is a problem. The "distinction between my killing someone, and its coming about because of what I do that someone else kills them" is crucial, but for Utilitarianism, each of us is merely an impersonal pipeline for effects in the world. It thus strips human life of all that makes it worthwhile, failing sufficiently to take account of each person's integrity, the projects central to their lives, the especial obligations and loyalty owed to family and friends.
For Williams himself, these were paramount. Liable to quash pomposity and bad argument with daunting acerbity, delighting in scurrilous gossip, he was also a tolerant, assiduous friend, a devoted father and a wonderful teacher, much loved by his graduate students. He helped Shirley Williams in her campaigning work, continuing to be generous of his time to political service after their marriage broke up in 1974. He sat on several public commissions covering most human vices, including gambling, misuse of drugs and pornography. Somehow reconciling the views of the 12 disparate members of the committee on obscenity and film censorship, he managed to produce a beautifully dispassionate, shrewd, pragmatic report on this most emotive issue in November 1979, much of which he wrote himself.
The committee's recommendations would, Williams claimed, if implemented, clear up pornography in Britain. Among other things, they simultaneously outlawed pornography from shops entered by children and unsuspecting members of the public, while allowing it to be shown in designated cinemas under a special licensing system.
Unfortunately, Mrs Thatcher had just come to power, so the committee's proposals were ignored as too liberal, although ultimately most of them were implemented piecemeal. Williams was never given due credit for his work, nor, during the Thatcher years, was he used on public commissions again.
He was, however, on the board of the English National Opera for 18 years, until 1986. He wrote about music with characteristic insight and erudition, his piece on opera in the Grove dictionary being considered by cognoscenti the best of its kind. What he loved about music, he said, was its capacity to produce, by means of abstract structures, stuff of great beauty and expressiveness that can actually convey human feelings and things that matter terribly. He read Anna Karenina over and over again and, in some ways, his own work should be regarded as, like music or literature, bringing the reader to a new vision of the world.
Williams pooh-poohed the incessantly-made antithesis between the rigorous analytic and the literary continental styles of philosophising, saying you might as well compare a car with four-wheel drive with a Japanese car (a category confusion of methodology and geography). Michael Tanner, the Cambridge exponent of Nietzsche, remembers how, in the 1960s, Williams picked up his copy of Beyond Good And Evil and demanded, "Why do you waste time over rubbish that Joad could have refuted?" But he was always able to change his mind, and soon became besotted with Nietzsche, saying that he longed to quote him every 20 minutes.
Still more unusually, Williams admired Foucault and Derrida, but equally he was an early enthusiast for the American analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, anticipating what he called "the Davidsonic boom - the noise a research programme makes when it hits Oxford." He was both instigator and bellwether for what was important in philosophy.
From 1979 to 1987, Williams was provost of King's College, Cambridge, and was said to have earlier been largely responsible for its being the first Cambridge college to admit women. In the late 1980s, disgusted at Thatcher's philistine destruction of Britain's academic life, he decamped to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, claiming that serious intellectual work could not be pursued in this country (though having recently produced his own best books, Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics And The Limits Of Philosophy (1985). His riposte to the obvious accusation was that not only rats but also human passengers were entitled to leave sinking ships. Ultimately, however, he returned to Oxford, saying he did not feel at home in America.
One of Nietzsche's aims that Williams avowedly emulated was to say as much in a page as most people say in a book. He was sometimes accused of unduly compressing (which he acknowledged) and of having a clarity of style that belied an underlying obscurity. Perhaps a disadvantage of his quickness and flair was an impatience with thorough, painstaking argument, a reluctance to linger, preferring to gesture at ideas economically and wittily, without precisely stating, defending or developing them. He therefore lays himself open to interpretation - and misinterpretation.
One of his greatest contributions to moral philosophy, the notion of internal and external reasons, is (as he complained) much misunderstood. So is the treatment, in Ethics And The Limits Of Philosophy, of the vexed issue of whether ethics is objective, which is often taken for simple moral scepticism.
In this, his greatest book, Williams argued that fact- resembling, "thick" ethical concepts ("courage" or "cruelty", say, as opposed to a "thin" ethical concept like "good") were so much part of the world picture of traditional societies as to count as "pieces of knowledge". But, he said, reflection and theory, by showing them to be ungrounded in scientific fact, have diminished the "confidence" that once made them so. Thus "there is knowledge that can be lost, but not by its being forgotten", knowledge that one society cannot share with a society that is historically or culturally remote.
Yet, according to Williams, even if we cannot share another society's knowledge, we can, to some extent, understand it, and even, in the case of the Ancient Greeks, arrive, through studying it, at a better understanding of ourselves. His scholarly examination of Ancient Greek thought in Shame And Necessity (1993) was primarily an attempt to "distinguish what we think from what we think that we think" (just as his meticulous study of Descartes was simultaneously a study of the theory of knowledge).
Hellenic ethics, Williams argued, affords an arena for praise and blame which is wider than Christian-based moral theories (stiflingly concentrated on free will, obligation and personal responsibility), and more accurate to our intuitions. Shame can be more sophisticated, internal and honourable than moral guilt which is standardly lauded over it. Luck and beauty, not merely motive and duty, are, however unfairly, essential to our estimation of action.
Gauguin's desertion of his family, although arguably it merits reproach, is also arguably justified because he succeeded in producing beautiful pictures. Had he failed to, he really would have done the wrong thing. "While we are sometimes guided by the notion that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were universally respected ... we have, in fact, deep and persistent reasons to be grateful that that is not the world we have."
With his eye for non-academic significance, Williams latterly tackled the contemporary relativist tendency to undermine the notion of truth. His last book, Truth And Truthfulness (2002) analyses the way Richard Rorty, Derrida and other followers of politically correct Foucaultian fashion sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology. It explores "the tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any truth to be found", and, unusually for a philosophy book, it makes the reader laugh aloud or want to cry.
Williams is often considered an "anti-theory" philosopher, but paradoxically, while saying that moral philosophy cannot change anything, he showed, by changing the way we do it, that it could. Reflecting on how moral reflectiveness kills moral knowledge, he nonetheless hoped that moral philosophy might in some way help us to live. In speech and writing, his controlled imagination cast sidelong shafts of brilliance on unexpected areas, and his erudition was enthralling because graceful, never pompous, always tied to life and illumination.
Williams himself, said a friend, was a life force beyond (assessments of) good and evil. After talking to him, you went away enchanted but also dissatisfied - determined to live more intensely and alertly, as he did. Yet although he appeared perpetually amused at life, there was a discontent and despair at the core of his philosophy and himself. His speed of intellect and awareness put him in a different gear and speed than others. For all his gregariousness and hilarity, he was solitary.
He is survived by his second wife, Patricia Law Skinner, his daughter Rebecca from his first marriage, and two sons, Jacob and Jonathan, from his second.
· Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, philosopher, born September 21 1929; died June 10 2003.