This is the easy way out, not because it isn’t true – those questions are important and they are discussed by philosophers – but because the answer is only a fragment of the truth. The reality is that most philosophers, most of the time, do not address questions like these. Open any leading academic philosophy journal in the analytic tradition (the tradition dominant in this country, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and you will find most of the articles are on quite different topics. A similar point applies to a recent column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times on the importance of the humanities. It said nice things about philosophy and why it should be studied in universities, citing the work of Peter Singer, Isaiah Berlin, and John Rawls. The Facebook pages of philosophers around the world included links to this column, with suggestions that we philosophers make sure the world at large knows about the column. (I guess I am doing my bit in the previous three sentences.) Unfortunately for the boosters, the issues that are the focus of the work of Singer, Berlin, and Rawls – issues like the nature of liberty, what makes for a just society, what are our obligations to non-human animals and to people who are worse off than we are – important though they undoubtedly are, do not dominate the best-known philosophy journals.

What, then, are the issues that dominate those journals? In the main, they are highly abstract questions that often mean little to the person in the street. What is truth? Are thoughts states of the brain? What makes me the same person today as I was yesterday? How do our words succeed in referring to objects and properties? Are ethical sentences prescriptive or descriptive? The person in the street does not need to attend lectures in philosophy to understand the issues Peter Singer is talking about in his books and articles, though they do need and want those lectures to help them adjudicate the issues (a lot of students sign up for his courses). But the person in the street does typically need to attend a lecture in philosophy or to read some well-chosen words to understand what question is being asked when we ask what is truth. And questions like these are unlikely to enliven a dinner party or a trip to the airport in the way that a discussion of the morality of eating meat can.

How much does this matter? Why should a philosopher’s day at the office concern matters that are immediately transparent to the person in the street? This question has been the subject of a good deal of soul searching by philosophers in recent times. Some of it was sparked by David McNaughton’s presidential address at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association, back in 2007, titled ‘Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious?’ I first thought that McNaughton’s address was courageous in the sense made famous by Yes Minister. I was wrong. Many philosophers welcomed his comments. They said that though there are bound to be philosophical topics of a highly technical nature that elude the understanding of the person in the street – Does Bell’s theorem really tell us that determinism is false? and, How should we respond to the discovery that Naive Set Theory is inconsistent? are examples – most of what we philosophers do at the office should make sense to the person in the street. Granted, explaining what’s at issue may call for a lecture or some well-chosen words of elucidation, but after the elucidation has been given, it should be clear what question it is that is being addressed and why it is worth addressing. I am not suggesting that the answers to the questions should be clear. Philosophy is rightly concerned with hard questions, and hard questions don’t have obvious answers. That’s what makes them hard. I am suggesting that what it is that may be hard to answer should be clear and should be clearly worth answering. Unfortunately, much current writing in philosophy fails this test. I might go on to give examples and name names. However, I am not that courageous. (McNaughton does name names, so to that extent he was being courageous; if you are interested, the text of his address is available online.)

That’s a long preamble to a review of a collection of reviews (and the odd short essay). Its point is that Bernard Williams, in these reviews, shows us how it should be done. He gives us a masterclass in writing about a whole range of philosophical questions in a way that is accessible, makes clear why we should be thinking about the question or questions the book under review raises, and where he himself stands on the issues. Well, not quite. Some of the books aren’t works of philosophy, though most are, and one or two of the reviews tell us why the question that the book raises isn’t worth raising to start with. This reviewer is glad he didn’t write one of those books.

As you would expect, the most interesting reviews are the ones devoted to the most important books. It is fascinating to see Williams – a major figure in philosophy in his own right, and also someone who was famously clever – engaging with the ideas in one or another agenda setting work. For me the highlights of the seventy-one chapters are his reviews cum short essays on Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Philosophical Explanations, Hilary Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face (which he didn’t like), and Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere and The Last Word.

I don’t recommend taking this book to dinner parties or handing it out to taxi drivers, but for those who wonder what philosophers do at the office, I do recommend reading it.