UC Irvine

This dissertation project offers the most comprehensive reexamination of philosopher Bernard Williams’ political thought to date. I argue, against the grain of the scholarship on Williams in both philosophy and political theory, that Williams’ work contains an identifiable philosophical approach which he dubbed “scepticism without reductionism.” I reconstruct this method, drawing on a broad cross-section of his work, and find that it provides a broadly humanistic and interdisciplinary template for political theorizing in an era of democratic decline. My reconstruction is meant to both correct prevailing disciplinary misconceptions about the limited value of Williams’ work in both moral philosophy and political theory, but also to bring this approach to life by utilizing it in a manner that is consistent with Williams’ own larger intellectual project of defending liberal democratic values against their most determined enemies. For Williams, philosophical critique needs to begin from Wittgensteinian “forms of life,” and thus needs to be motivated by problems of genuine urgency for those who sought to better understand the values and practices of a particular society. Thus, Williams offers a culturally specific, historically grounded, yet philosophically rigorous model for philosophical reflection and critique. I utilize this approach, and Williams’ body of work, to show how “scepticism without reductionism,” can speak to a number of problems of deep-seated importance to citizens of liberal democracy today. These include debates over citizen competence, income inequality, climate change, the advent of widespread political misinformation, and the uses of tragedy as a means of culturally embedded political critique.