Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 19, 2005

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Sir Bernard Williams was an English moral philosopher, noted by The Times of London as the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time." Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: "What does it mean to live well?" This was a question few Western analytic philosophers had explored since the Greeks, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral obligation. For Williams, moral obligation, insofar as the phrase had any meaning, had to be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life. As Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge for over a decade, and the Provost of King's College, Cambridge for almost as long, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of moral philosophy to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology and, in particular, to the Greeks. He saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed no longer to know how to communicate with one another.

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