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    Title
    Shame and Necessity
    Authors and contributors
    By (author) Bernard Williams, Foreword by A. A. Long
    Physical properties
    Format: Paperback
    Number of pages: 280
    Width: 152 mm
    Height: 229 mm
    Thickness: 19 mm
    Weight: 399 g
    Audience
    College/higher education
    General/trade
    Professional and scholarly
    Language
    English
    ISBN
    ISBN 13: 9780520256439
    ISBN 10: 0520256433
    Classifications
    BISAC category code: PHI002000
    Dewey: 881.0109384
    Nielsen BookScan Product Class: S2.1
    BICMainSubject: HP
    BISAC category code: PHI005000
    LC classification: BJ
    Edition
    2, Revised
    Edition statement
    2nd Revised edition
    Publisher
    University of California Press
    Imprint name
    University of California Press
    Publication date
    15 April 2008
    Publication City/Country
    Berkerley/US
    Biographical note
    Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was one of the most distinguished British philosophers of the twentieth century, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
    Main description
    We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the impact of this volume in the context of Williams's stunning career.