Not a bit, said Williams, it was the first part of a trilogy. Quine published a book with the rather odd title From a Logical Point of View (1953) A bit pompous, I ventured. The test was simple: success or failure with the joystick was ignored; only the time that elapsed between the light coming on and the pedal extinguishing it was measured.His sense of humour was as far-ranging and unexpected The American philosopher W.V. At the bottom of the screen a small red light came on from time to time; when it did, the pilot pressed a pedal that turned it off.

In his hands was a joystick controlling a cross-in-circle which he had to fix on each oncoming plane. In one, the pilot sat facing a screen on which was projected a film showing a series of planes approaching rapidly from different angles. But his subtlety of mind was far-ranging.His RAF service involved devising reaction tests for pilots, vital at a time when aircraft speeds were rapidly increasing. His years of marriage to Patricia Skinner helped to liberate him from an internal austerity, which threatened him severely as a young man.Richard Wollheim * Richard Wollheim rightly concentrated on Bernard Williams’s catholic sense of philosophy and equal gift for friendship, writes Nicolas Barker.

It made something of a pessimist of him, but he never ceased to believe that the amelioration of economic circumstances and the struggle for social justice had much to offer an inherently unfair world.Williams was married twice, the first time to the future politician Shirley Catlin, and both marriages brought him fulfilment, though naturally differing in kind. But gradually he came to accept it as part and parcel of “moral luck”. What Kant and Bentham left out of their moral philosophies, thereby incurring the charge of philosophical inadequacy, is just that which, when reinserted into life, makes the whole thing worthwhile.To Williams too it could seem unfair that this thing, however we think of it, should be unfairly distributed, and in his younger days he might have been willing to reject something that could not be made available to all. What attached him to his friends was that he found in them a particular twist, a peculiar quirk, of human nature. Williams was an incomparable friend, but he was not, and would not have wanted to be, a loyal friend if this means, as it appears to, someone who is a friend out of loyalty Williams was a friend out of friendship.

Wagner spoke to him with great immediacy, both through the music and through the arch-consuming myths of honour, heartache, cunning, and betrayal.It is often said of someone, particularly in an obituary, that he was the “loyallest of friends”. Increasingly he came to experience the depth and spirituality of what was northern. One of the few disagreements that he had with his close friend Isaiah Berlin was that Berlin appeared to think that it was no obstacle to the understanding of an opera that one did not follow the plot.With the passage of the years, Williams ceased to feel that it was the sun-drenched south that had the monopoly of culture, musical culture included. Never far away from this enjoyment was the sense of narrative, either as this held the music together from the outside, as in opera, which he loved with a deep passion, or as this emerged from within, in the unfolding of a motif. What engaged him most deeply about music was the way in which it seamlessly combined structures of a highly abstract nature and the flow of pure, or at any rate intense, feeling. He was knighted in 1999 for services to philosophy.The two great unadulterated pleasures of Williams’s life were music and friendship.Music was as significant to him as breathing, and in middle age he felt it necessary to learn to play the piano: he retained a Socratic assessment of the grasp of skill. When he returned to England, he rejoined the Labour Party, but it was no longer a party with which he had much in common.