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The Elements and Patterns of Being

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The Elements and

Patterns of Being
Essays in Metaphysics

Donald C. Williams

EDITED BY

A. R. J. Fisher

1
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3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/2/2018, SPi

To Peter Forrest, my first teacher in metaphysics

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Preface

Metaphysics continues to flourish in the early twenty-first century and finds itself
at the center of mainstream analytic philosophy. Such a paradise for metaphys-
icians was created by the re-birth of metaphysics in the late twentieth century.
This re-birth is typically understood as coming out of the demise of logical
positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and the later Wittgenstein in the
mid-twentieth century; supposedly, contemporary metaphysicians are ‘heirs of
the philosophical tradition that began with a rejection of metaphysics’ (Stalnaker
2003, 1). However, the re-birth of metaphysics did not originate solely from the
crumbling of these anti-metaphysical trends. During this period metaphysics was
kept alive by certain philosophers who influenced others of the next generation.
Donald Cary Williams (1899–1983) was one of these philosophers who defended
and practiced metaphysics at the height of its unpopularity. His steadfast con-
viction in the subject made a lasting impact and played an important role in its
re-birth, or more accurately, its revival.
Despite his contribution to the development of twentieth-century metaphysics
and the continuing relevance of his work, Williams is glossed over and certain
details of his metaphysical doctrines misunderstood. One reason for this,
I believe, is that the material from which we can extract his metaphysics is
scattered throughout journals, hard-to-find anthologies, and out-of-print books,
or found in the 1966 collection of his philosophical writings, Principles of
Empirical Realism, which similarly went out of print. But Williams always wanted
to publish a systematic treatise in metaphysics. For several decades, from 1950 to
old age in retirement, he worked on this grand project in a variety of ways. His
lectures at Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s were based on his research
for his book, sometimes envisaged as a two-volume tome, and the various papers
he read at conferences and universities were polished snippets of what was to
come. In the end no final manuscript was produced, but the papers he left
unpublished survived.
This book is an edited collection of Williams’s essays in metaphysics. Six of
the chapters are his most influential and well-known articles, including his
seminal piece on ontology: ‘On the Elements of Being’ (1953) and his classic
papers on the metaphysics of time: ‘The Sea Fight Tomorrow’ (1951) and ‘The
Myth of Passage’ (1951). The other six chapters are previously unpublished
papers that have been carefully selected from the Donald Cary Williams Papers
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viii PREFACE

(http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/000604842/catalog). The essays from the Williams

Papers contain important elaborations and clarifications of his metaphysical doc-
trines that are not found in his published writings. As such they complement the
published articles that are being reprinted here. But they also contain new, original,
and sometimes mature discussions by Williams on fundamental topics in meta-
physics. As a whole these twelve essays compose, however incomplete, a coherent
picture of Williams’s metaphysical system and reveal the extent of his metaphysical
vision.
I have four editorial preliminaries. First, I have inserted footnotes in certain
places to indicate a related point elsewhere in Williams’s work or to supply an
appropriate reference for the reader. These footnotes are prefixed with ‘EN’
(which stands for ‘Editorial Note’); the other footnotes are Williams’s. Second,
most of the citations in his essays have been changed from traditional citations in
footnotes to in-text citations. Third, I have made several grammatical corrections
to Williams’s unpublished papers. Fortunately, they are few in number and
minor, but I have not indicated their presence in the text. Fourth, Chapters 5 and
12 are transcribed from lectures that Williams wrote and annotated for his 1974
University of Notre Dame lecture series The Elements and Patterns of Being. The
lectures had been recorded and I used the audio versions to resolve any typo-
graphical uncertainties. I followed the written version except where the audio
version is clearer in expression or style. I thank University of Notre Dame
Archives for permission to quote from the audio version of the lectures.
I conceived of this project when I began to explore Williams’s metaphysics in
its historical context approximately two years ago. Along the way I have been
assisted by others. I thank Helen Beebee and Hugh Mellor for advice concerning
the project. I thank Keith Campbell and John Heil for discussions in person and
in correspondence about Williams and giving me motivation to press on with the
book. I thank Peter Anstey for providing information about Williams from the
Papers of David Armstrong, National Library of Australia. I am immensely
grateful to Steffi Lewis, who has given me kind permission to access David Lewis’s
archive and publish excerpts of Lewis’s letters (courtesy of Princeton University
Library). I am also grateful for her encouragement and support, and for recount-
ing her years as a student of Williams at Harvard. I thank David C. Williams (son
of Williams and copyright holder of the Williams Papers) for permission
to publish excerpts of Williams’s letters and the essays of this volume. I am
also grateful for the helpful and friendly staff assistance at Harvard University
Archives (Pusey Library) and for their permission to access the Williams Papers.
I thank Jessica Pezdek and Daina Lauren Swagerty for their hospitality during my
visits to Cambridge, MA. I also thank the British Academy for a Newton
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PREFACE ix

International Fellowship, the John Rylands Research Institute for research sup-
port, and Queen’s University for a Bader Postdoctoral Fellowship, where this
manuscript was completed. Finally, I thank my wife, Kendall Ann Fisher, who
has been a wonderful companion throughout this project and everything else. She
has selflessly taken the time to give me perceptive comments on the Introduction
and to listen to me go on about this project and Williams ad nauseam. I owe a lot
to our philosophical discussions at home, in my office, in the park, the pub, the
café, and other locations in our manifold.
ARJF
Kingston, Canada
31 May 2016
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Contents

List of Figures xiii

Introduction 1
1. The Duty of Philosophy (c.1965) 14
2. The Elements of Being (1953) 24
3. Universals and Existents (1960) 51
4. Universal Concepts and Particular Processes (1962) 67
5. How Reality is Reasonable (1974) 80
6. Necessary Facts (1963) 104
7. Dispensing with Existence (1962) 125
8. The Sea Fight Tomorrow (1951) 139
9. The Myth of Passage (1951) 159
10. The Nature of Time (1966) 173
11. The Shape of Time (1968) 195
12. The Bugbear of Fate (1974) 212

References 227
Index 235
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List of Figures

Figure 1 29
Figure 2 82
Figure 3 108
Figure 4 187
Figure 5 188
Figure 6 189
Figure 7 192
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Introduction

Donald C. Williams (1899–1983) is an important but underappreciated philoso-

pher of the analytic tradition. He wrote more than fifty articles and one book on
such wide-ranging topics as epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
science, probability, induction, and metaphysics. One of his lasting contributions
is his defense of metaphysics when logical positivism, ordinary language philos-
ophy, and the later Wittgenstein were at their peak in the mid-twentieth century.
In keeping metaphysics alive during this period he influenced philosophers
who went on to revive metaphysics in the late twentieth century, in particular
D.M. Armstrong and David Lewis. Today, as metaphysics flourishes, Williams’s
metaphysics is still relevant. His ontology remains a leading candidate in
the metaphysics of properties and his articles on the metaphysics of time are
considered loci classici of the subject.
A complete explication of Williams’s metaphysics and his defense of the
subject would require a detailed discussion of his other philosophical commit-
ments. Unfortunately, a full treatment of his philosophy in its historical context
and a detailed explication of his metaphysics must be left for another occasion.1
In this Introduction I outline some of his main philosophical doctrines, explain
how they relate to his metaphysics, and summarize the context of the papers of
this volume.
Williams began his studies with a focus on English Literature, receiving an AB
in the subject from Occidental College, Los Angeles in 1922, but then switched to
Philosophy, receiving an AM in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1924 and
then a PhD, also from Harvard, in 1928. After a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship,
which took him to France and Germany, Williams worked at UCLA from 1930 to
1939 and then Harvard from 1939 to 1967 (Firth, Nozick, & Quine 1983, 245–46;
Hook 1956, 506–7). As a student in the 1920s he was heavily influenced by the
new wave of realism that swept across the English-speaking world in the early

1
For an account of his defense of metaphysics, see (Fisher 2017).
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 INTRODUCTION

twentieth century. Following in the footsteps of Samuel Alexander, Bertrand

Russell, and the American New Realists (especially Edwin B. Holt, William
P. Montague, and Ralph Barton Perry), Williams articulated and defended a
naturalistic realism grounded in an empiricist framework.
For Williams, empiricism entails the claim that all knowledge pertaining to
matters of fact is known inductively. A hypothesis is probable in so far as it
explains the observed data (Williams 1942, 99), and the degree to which it is
probable depends in part on the improbability of competing hypotheses
(Williams 1959, 162). Williams argues that metaphysical realism—the view that
there is an external world independent of our conscious experience—is the most
probable candidate hypothesis because it explains the relevant data from common
sense and science whereas competing hypotheses, such as subjectivism, do not or at
most provide less satisfying explanations (Williams 1934). Similarly, he argues that
metaphysical naturalism—the view that every existent is located and extended in a
single system of space-time—is most likely true because it best explains the
observed data of common sense and science with the least number of primitive
principles and the least number of fundamental kinds of entities; competing
doctrines such as substance dualism are less probable (Williams 1944).
These arguments for metaphysical realism and metaphysical naturalism imply
that metaphysical inquiry and metaphysical statements or hypotheses are mean-
ingful and confirmable. These arguments and therefore his defense of metaphys-
ics rely on two central premises. First, that induction is a genuine mode of
inference, and second, that induction has ‘ontological reach’ in metaphysics as
well as in science (Williams 1942, 99), i.e., it can be applied not only to scientific
hypotheses but also to metaphysical hypotheses through the use of inference to
the best explanation in both cases. Williams defends the first premise in his 1947
book The Ground of Induction, using a novel theory of induction. I won’t discuss
his theory of induction, since it falls outside the scope of this Introduction.2 The
second premise is relevant because its truth depends in part on Williams’s
conception of metaphysics, especially as sketched in Chapter 1, ‘The Duty of
Philosophy’.
The only way we could deny that induction can be applied to metaphysical
hypotheses is if we believed that there is something distinctive about metaphysics
that disqualifies us from inferring a metaphysical hypothesis and that, in contrast,
there is something special about scientific inquiry that allows us to confirm
scientific hypotheses. However, Williams argues, there is no real divide between
metaphysics and science. The only difference between science and metaphysics

2
For a development of Williams’s theory of induction, see (Stove 1986).
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INTRODUCTION 

lies in the generality of their subject matter. Metaphysics and science (and
common sense) are on a continuum or ‘cut of the same cloth’ (ch. 1, p. 18).
Hence we can use the empirical method in both domains.
For Williams, metaphysics is not merely an empirical science. It is ‘the
thoroughly empirical science’ (ch. 2, p. 24). It concerns the most general, all-
encompassing subject matter of any science. Metaphysicians study all things and
their most general features. They aim to ‘explain every kind of fact by one simple
principle or simple set of principles’ (Williams 1944, 431; 1966, 227). Owing to
the extent of this explanatory and epistemic ambition, a metaphysical theory is
‘directly relevant to and confirmable or falsifiable by every item of every experi-
ence’ (Williams 1944, 431; 1966, 227). In contrast, scientists study restricted
domains of reality: biologists study biological things, chemists study chemical
things, and physicists study physical things. Their explanatory goals are less
ambitious. They seek to explain a restricted set of facts. Not every item of
experience is directly relevant to the confirmation or falsification of their theories.
Williams thought of metaphysics as having two ‘branches’, namely, analytic
ontology and speculative cosmology. Ontology is the study of the categories of
being, i.e., the most general features of every existent. Cosmology is the study of
particular kinds of beings, their nature, and how they are connected, i.e., the most
general features of all existents. The analytic mode of inquiry concerns questions
about the nature of something. E.g., what is a thing? The analytic mode is
deductive and provides an ‘analysis’ of something into its component parts.
The speculative mode of inquiry concerns questions about the origin of some-
thing. E.g., why does a thing of this kind exist? The speculative mode is inductive
and provides a speculative explanation of why something occurs in a certain way
in relation to other things.
This analytic ontology/speculative cosmology distinction has gained some
currency in contemporary metaphysics. For instance, it is at the core of Armstrong
and Keith Campbell’s approach to metaphysics (Armstrong 1978a; 1978b, 126–7;
1993, 66; 1997, 138; Campbell 1976, 21–2, parts 2 and 3; 1990), and Frank
Jackson appeals to it in order to separate the cosmological thesis of physicalism
from debates in ontology that concern ‘the supervenience of predication on
nature’ (Jackson 1998, 15–16). The main source of Williams’s thoughts on this
distinction is found in scant remarks in ‘The Elements of Being’ (Chapter 2).
However, in Chapter 1 he explains more fully the ontology/cosmology distinction
and its relation to the analytic/speculative distinction. He says that the two
distinctions are independent of and cut across each other. Hence it is not the
case that the analytic mode of inquiry must concern ontology. There is specula-
tive ontology as well as analytic cosmology. His position in this regard is a
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 INTRODUCTION

development from how he understands these distinctions in his published works.

Chapter 1 is therefore important for understanding his conception of metaphys-
ics properly. Chapter 1 is also a well-polished version of Williams’s introduction
to his intended book on ontology. For this reason it serves as a suitable intro-
duction to the chapters that succeed it.
One of Williams’s major contributions to metaphysics is his ontology of abstract
particulars, or what he calls ‘tropes’. Examples of tropes include: the redness of
this rose, the weight of that table, Napoleon’s posture, the distance between
London and Manchester, and the similarity between today’s cappuccino and
yesterday’s cappuccino. Tropes are often called ‘cases’, ‘individual accidents’,
‘modes’, ‘moments’, ‘particularized properties’, or ‘property-instances’. For
Williams, ‘abstract particular’ is the more appropriate expression because he
conceives of tropes as qualitative natures that are abstract and particular.3
Williams first argued for the coherence of tropes in 1931 but it wasn’t until
1953 that he published a more complete ontology in his seminal ‘The Elements
of Being’ (Chapter 2).4 This chapter is Williams’s classic statement of his
ontology of tropes and it is arguably his most influential work.
Williams’s trope ontology is one of the leading solutions to the problem of
universals in contemporary metaphysics. It can also account for relations, sub-
stance, events, causation, laws of nature, objects of perception, sense-data, con-
tent of language and thought, mental states and the like, and serve as part of a
theory of truthmaking according to which tropes are truthmakers. It therefore
has great explanatory power. In addition, it is more ontologically parsimonious
than most of its rivals because it is a ‘one-category’ ontology.5 Competing
ontologies either entail a commitment to more than one ontological category
or have less explanatory power. Therefore, since metaphysics is an empirical
science that involves us ultimately making an inference to the best explanation
among candidate hypotheses, Williams’s trope ontology should be preferred.
This argument has been developed by Keith Campbell in Abstract Particulars

3
In an alternate version of Chapter 3, ‘Universals and Existents’, Williams uses the term ‘trome’
instead of ‘trope’. He writes: ‘I have resorted to “trome”, invented because it sounds right, though it
has an affinity with “trope”, accidental, I confess, which may be suggested by the fact that whereas, in
Greek a “tropos” is a turning a “tromos” is a trembling’ (Donald Cary Williams Papers, HUG(FP)
53.45, box 3, folder: ‘Universals and Existents ‘60’, Harvard University Archives, p. 12). However, he
reverted to ‘trope’ in the 1960s. I won’t speculate about Williams’s choice of labels for abstract
particulars here.
4
He argues that possibly there are entities that are both abstract and particular in (Williams 1931).
5
There are other versions of trope ontology. One variant posits tropes or modes as ways
substances are. Thus, substances are more fundamental than tropes. For a defense of this trope-
substance ontology, see (Heil 2012; Martin 1980).
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INTRODUCTION 

(1990). More recently, Anna-Sofia Maurin and Douglas Ehring have defended
trope ontology in If Tropes (Maurin 2002) and Tropes (Ehring 2011) respectively.
This is in addition to the many journals and volumes that contain countless
articles on trope ontology.6
In Chapter 2 Williams explains how the category of trope is the one funda-
mental category of being. His goal is to analyze concrete particulars and univer-
sals in terms of tropes. He suggests that concrete particulars are nothing more
than mereological sums of tropes concurring in the same region of space-time. In
short, concrete particulars or substances are bundles of tropes.7 Similarly, uni-
versals do not compose a fundamental category. In Chapter 2, Williams tenta-
tively states that universals are sets or classes of similar tropes. Redness, for
example, is the set or class of red tropes. This has been the usual interpretation of
Williams’s theory of universals.8 However, by 1957 he revised his position.9 In
Chapter 3, (‘Universals and Existents’), and Chapter 4, (‘Universal Concepts and
Particular Processes’), Williams rejects this set-theoretic account of universals.
In Chapter 3, he argues that the set or class of red tropes is not ‘what we mean’
(to use Williams’s phrase) by ‘Redness’. What we mean is the redness that is
wholly present in this rose and wholly present in my Australian rules football.
But since Williams is committed to a one-category ontology of tropes he cannot
posit universals as a primitive category. So he explains the realist intuition that
there are immanent universals in language and thought using his ontology of
tropes. According to Williams, when we recognize immanent universals we are
considering tropes as kinds. The universal is nothing more than the trope
counted by exact resemblance. More precisely, in ‘generalizing’ tropes we treat
them as immanent universals. The upshot is that we can explain what it means to
say that redness is in this rose and in the football without positing universals as
a primitive category.10

6
Here is a minute sample of articles on tropes: (Cameron 2006; Gibb 2015; Macdonald 1998;
McDaniel 2001; Schaffer 2001; Schneider 2002; Trettin 2000).
7
The bundle theory of tropes is in E.B. McGilvary (1939a, 7, n. 6) and G.F. Stout (1923, 114),
two philosophers who influenced Williams’s trope ontology. Versions of the bundle theory of
properties were defended earlier by Holt and Perry. They developed their bundle theories from
suggestions by William James. Williams is aware of the tradition he is following here. Williams says
of James: ‘he suggested the sort of neutral objectivism which evolved into neorealism, that every
concrete thing is a congeries of properties . . .’ (Williams 1942, 118).
8
See inter alia (Daly 1997, 148; Forrest 1993, 47; Livanios 2007, 357; Oliver 1996, 34; Schaffer
2001, 247–8; Trettin 2000, 290–1).
9
In a letter to Richard B. Brandt on 22 November 1957 he proposes the theory of universals
found in Chapters 3–6. Donald Cary Williams Papers, HUG(FP) 53.6, box 8, folder 2, Harvard
University Archives.
10
In certain places Williams uses the terms ‘generalization’ and ‘generization’ and their cognates
interchangeably.
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 INTRODUCTION

Despite the fact that Williams read Chapters 3 and 4 at various universities, he
never published this theory of universals. He had planned for it to be part of his
book on ontology, a work he was writing throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Chapter 3 was posthumously published in 1986 (thanks to David Lewis), but
there is still much to learn from his theory of universals, especially his distinction
between abstraction and generalization and his understanding of the abstract/
concrete distinction and the universal/particular distinction.11 These conceptual
subtleties and other arguments in Williams’s ontology have not been exploited
fully and a closer study of his ontology will go some way in responding to
criticisms of trope ontology in the literature.
Another important metaphysical doctrine that Williams espoused was ‘actu-
alism’. According to actualism, there are no potencies, essences, substrata, prime
matter, occult forces, powers, metaphysical indeterminacy, metaphysical vague-
ness, possible worlds, possible individuals, Platonic entities, etc. All that exists are
fully determinate actual existents. This includes things like concrete particulars,
their concrete and abstract parts, and the mereological sums and sets of all such
things. In addition, Williams says there are three fundamental relations that hold
between actual existents: spatiotemporal relations, parthood relations, and
resemblance relations. Fundamentally speaking, the world is a four-dimensional
manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’; all else supervenes on it and sets or classes
and mereological sums of its parts.
Actualism is somewhat austere given that it rules out several kinds of entities
that many contemporary metaphysicians are happy to posit, e.g., necessarily
existing propositions, Platonic types, and causal powers. However, Williams
takes it as a working hypothesis—something to be revised or given up if it cannot
explain every fact or item of experience. In addition, he thinks actualism is
motivated by empiricism and metaphysical naturalism. He argues that it should
be our working hypothesis because it is ontologically frugal, posits a minimal
number of fundamental relations, and is supported by science, logic, and empir-
ical observation. For Williams, all that remains is to demonstrate its explanatory
power. As such his actualism functions much like David Lewis’s Humean super-
venience, and, interestingly, there is an important line of influence here from
Williams to Lewis (for discussion, see Fisher 2015).
In Williams’s published writings actualism does not take center stage. It
operates in the background or as a starting point from which he hopes to account

11
For discussion of Williams’s theory of universals, see (Baxter 2001, 461, n. 26; Campbell 1990,
43–5; Fisher 2015, 2017; Heil 2012, 100–6; 2015b, forthcoming). For a development of Williams’s
account of the universal/particular distinction, see (Ehring 2004; 2011, ch. 1).
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INTRODUCTION 

for some fact or item of experience. As a result, he does not give it much
attention, nor does it receive much elaboration. In Chapter 5, ‘How Reality is
Reasonable’, Williams remedies this situation. This chapter is the first of three
lectures, under the heading The Elements and Patterns of Being, that he delivered
at the University of Notre Dame in February 1974. He devotes this chapter to the
ontological nature and explanatory power of the three fundamental relations of
actualism. He explains how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number,
causation, substance, meaning, a priori knowledge, and induction, and how it
solves Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction. This mature statement of his
metaphysical system is of interest for several reasons. One topic is Williams’s
trope-theoretic account of classes. David Lewis was interested in it in the early
1980s, although Lewis first heard of Williams’s theory in Williams’s lectures on
ontology at Harvard ‘circa 1963’ (D. Lewis 1991, 56, n. 13).12 Williams’s theory is
relevant to ongoing discussions on the metaphysics of sets, as Williams seems to
anticipate Peter Forrest’s trope-theoretic theory of classes (Forrest 2002).
Chapters 6 and 7 concern actualism and the explanatory work it can do in
metaphysics. In Chapter 6, ‘Necessary Facts’, Williams demonstrates that actu-
alism can account for necessary facts in terms of partitive and resemblance
relations, i.e., relations that are intrinsic. Thus necessity is analyzed in terms of
intrinsicality in virtue of the fact that necessity is an objective property of
partitive and resemblance relations among actual qualitied contents. His theory
is first and foremost a combinatorial account of modality: what is possible is
grounded in combinations of actual existents, and second it is a realist account of
modality: what is necessary is a factual matter and not verbal or conventional,
contra many of his contemporaries such as W.V. Quine, who were typically
conventionalists about modality. In Chapter 7, ‘Dispensing with Existence’,
Williams outlines his preferred theory of existence. According to Williams,
there is no real first-order property of existence that is had by actual existents.
There are actual existents and existence is the sum of these actual existents.
Existence as a unique mode of being or special kind of activity is thus dispensed
with. One of the over-arching goals of his intended book on ontology was to
argue that actualism explains all that we need to explain, and if it succeeds in this
feat, we have reason to believe that it is most likely true after a cost-benefit
analysis of competing hypotheses.

12
Williams taught PHIL155 Metaphysics in the fall of 1963. The course description reads: ‘Central
problems of ontology and cosmology, especially those of whole and part, particular and universal,
space and time, and causation’ (1963–1964 Courses of Instruction for Harvard and Radcliffe, Faculty
of Arts and Sciences. Official Register of Harvard University, vol. 60, no. 21, p. 298).
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 INTRODUCTION

Another much-discussed aspect of Williams’s philosophy is his metaphysics

of time. Williams pioneered the defense of the view that the world is a four-
dimensional manifold in which objects exist in three dimensions of space and
one dimension of time. For Williams, this means that past, present, and future are
equally real. That is, past, present, and future exist simpliciter, although the past
and future do not exist now, just as the robin’s nest under the steps over there
does not exist here. This view is known as eternalism. Furthermore, since to exist
is to be an event or a thing in the manifold on Williams’s view, there is no
primitive property of being past, being present, or being future that is had by
events. Events stand in earlier than and later than relations to each other in the
manifold and terms like ‘ . . . is present’ are indexical: ‘present’ refers to the time at
which it is uttered in a sentence. So there is no absolute temporal becoming
whereby events and things move through time. The world at bottom is tenseless.
This doctrine is known as the B-theory of time. Finally, for Williams, concrete
objects are spread out across time as well as space. My reality is not entirely
constituted by me now. My reality also exists in the past and future. For Williams,
this is best captured by the idea that objects persist through time in virtue of
having temporal parts at different times. I am a four-dimensional worm and not a
substance that is wholly present at different times. This theory of persistence is
called perdurantism. Williams calls his view the pure manifold theory of time. It is
a combination of eternalism, the B-theory of time, and in some places perdur-
antism. He does not think the pure manifold theory entails perdurantism, but
since he argues that it best solves problems of change and persistence he packages
it with eternalism and the B-theory.13
In his classic 1951 articles ‘The Sea Fight Tomorrow’ (Chapter 8) and ‘The
Myth of Passage’ (Chapter 9) Williams defends the pure manifold theory respec-
tively against the problem of future contingents and the argument that since we
experience the passage of time we must admit a genuine temporal becoming.
Given the dialectical goals of these papers, Williams provides at best a brief
characterization of his metaphysics of time with little room for detailed elabor-
ation of his position. Chapter 10, ‘The Nature of Time’, provides a more expan-
sive treatment of what he thinks a theory of time must explain, as well as his
reasons for why the pure manifold theory is the best explanation of the appro-
priate data when compared with competing doctrines, such as presentism, the
growing-block theory, and the moving spotlight theory.

13
For recent work on eternalism, the B-theory, and perdurantism, see (Dyke & Bardon 2013;
Hawley 2001; Miller 2005; Moss 2012; Sider 2001; Skow 2015).
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INTRODUCTION 

Towards the end of Chapter 10 and in Chapter 11, ‘The Shape of Time’,
Williams discusses the remaining aspects of his metaphysics of time in more
detail. Contrary to some interpretations Williams does not reject outright the
claim that time ‘passes’.14 Instead he thinks the phenomenon we call ‘felt passage’
can be explained in terms of facts about the B-theoretic distribution of the
contents of the four-dimensional manifold. He also thinks time has a direction
or arrow, whereas other B-theorists have been known to deny that there is any
genuine asymmetry between events that are earlier than or later than other events
in the manifold (see for instance Horwich 1989). The fact that the B-theory or the
pure manifold theory does not preserve the fact that time has some kind of
direction has been a drawback of the view. So Williams’s attempts in Chapter 11
to show that the B-theory can account for the fact that time has a direction or
arrow constitutes another reason to favor the theory.
In Chapters 10, 11, and 12 Williams also speculates about large-scale cosmo-
logical traits of the universe. Since he thinks cosmology is part of metaphysics, his
interests are not entirely concerned with or driven by what physicists say about
the cosmos. He considers several cosmological possibilities about the shape of
time; for instance, that the whole time stream could be looped back on itself
(shaped like a donut) and that the whole time stream could undergo eternal
recurrence, i.e., consist of numerically distinct epochs repeated one after another
forever. He even suggests that a four-dimensional worm, i.e., a particular world
line or ‘time streak’, could be oriented against the normal current of the main
time stream. Such a time streak thereby travels back (or forward) in time. So, for
Williams, time travel is metaphysically possible.
Williams’s explicit commitment to the possibility of time travel first appeared
in 1956, when he revised ‘The Myth of Passage’ for Sidney Hook’s American
Philosophers at Work. He went on to research the topic for many years, giving
several talks on time travel in the 1960s and 1970s. He lectured on the subject in
classes at Harvard; for instance, PHIL157 Metaphysics: Problems of Cosmology,
Spring 1965, a class that David Lewis was enrolled in. Chapter 10, ‘The Nature of
Time’, was derived from handouts and lectures for this course and for his
cosmology course of Spring 1966. After ‘The Nature of Time’ was written and
then presented in June 1966, Williams assigned it in his PHIL155 Metaphysics:
Elements of Ontology and Cosmology, Spring 1967—the semester before he
retired. Unfortunately, Williams has been mistakenly interpreted as denying
the possibility of time travel (for example, by Meiland 1974; Smart 1963). The
printing of these unpublished papers goes some way in setting the record straight

14
This incorrect interpretation is in (Mozersky 2015, 166).
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 INTRODUCTION

about his position on time travel. Indeed, his theory of time travel is one of the
earliest accounts of the possibility of time travel in analytic metaphysics, a
popular topic among contemporary metaphysicians.
Chapter 12, ‘The Bugbear of Fate’, is the second lecture that Williams delivered
at the University of Notre Dame in February 1974. It contains Williams’s
reactions to articles on the metaphysics of time from the 1960s. He rejects Nelson
Pike’s (1965) argument that given God our actions are fated and Peter Geach’s
(1966) claim that if time travel is possible we can change the past. So it continues
with the same themes of the preceding two chapters. However, it begins with an
important critique of David Lewis’s (1973) ontology of concrete possible worlds.
Williams anticipates some of the arguments against Lewis’s ontology that subse-
quently appeared in the metaphysics of modality. His attempts to undermine the
need to posit possible worlds as truthmakers for counterfactuals or rather posit
possible worlds as part of the analysis of counterfactuals remain a live issue (see
for instance Heil 2015a).
I end this Introduction with some remarks about Williams’s place in the history
of philosophy and his impact on analytic metaphysics. He falls squarely within the
empiricist tradition of Locke and Hume, broadly speaking, and is to be associated
with certain elements of Russell’s logical atomism and with neorealism. He
defended the legitimacy of analysis and reduction and forwarded the cause of
realism and metaphysical naturalism. But at the same time he engaged with
schools of thought that do not fall under the heading of analytic philosophy—e.g.,
British Idealism, Existentialism, neo-Scholasticism, and Romanticism. Moreover,
his defense of metaphysics is partly a product of philosophers that do not count,
strictly speaking, as doing ‘analytic’ philosophy. For instance, Williams is influenced
in many respects by Samuel Alexander, who is not considered an analytic philoso-
pher (although Alexander is a metaphysical realist and part of the neorealist
movement). From Williams’s perspective he was interested in engaging with and
drawing from those who believed in the substance of classical philosophy and its
perennial problems. He also searched the history of philosophy for the right
answers, drawing freely from many eras and standing on the shoulders of the best
thinkers of Western philosophy. He was anything but ahistorical.
Williams is an ‘analytic’ philosopher (in our sense of that term) who was
brought up on metaphysics (of varying traditions) of the 1910s and 1920s, a time
when metaphysics was taken seriously and treated as a respectable part of
philosophy. This belief in the legitimacy of metaphysics stayed with him. As
logical positivism gained momentum in the 1930s he was one of its first oppon-
ents, arguing that a verificationist theory of meaning is wrong-headed (Williams
1937/1938a, 1937/1938b) and that a conventionalist doctrine of the a priori is
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INTRODUCTION 

doomed to fail (Williams 1938). As logical positivism evolved and ordinary

language philosophy and the later Wittgenstein joined the attack against meta-
physics, Williams continued with his efforts to articulate substantive metaphysical
theories in the 1940s and 1950s. Given that his defense of metaphysics and his
metaphysical theories influenced philosophers of the next generation, he should
be understood as a conduit that connects metaphysics of the early twentieth
century with metaphysics of the late twentieth century. By keeping metaphysics
alive in the mid-twentieth century he ensured there was some kind of continuity
of metaphysics throughout the century.
To be sure, Williams was not the only philosopher who did metaphysics in the
mid-twentieth century. Gustav Bergmann is regarded as taking an ontological turn
that brought metaphysics back and Quine is widely credited with playing a major
role in reviving metaphysics. But Bergmann was originally a positivist and Quine
was associated with members of the logical positivist movement. They were both
caught up in an anti-metaphysical trend that they rejected in their own ways,
whereas Williams was a metaphysician from his student days in the 1920s to his
retirement in the 1960s. As a result, Bergmann and Quine, in their defense of some
kind of metaphysics, did not criticize anti-metaphysical trends in the way that
Williams did. This is what makes Williams a historically unique mid-twentieth-
century metaphysician. Some of his most important legacies are due to his unique
position in the history of analytic philosophy. For instance, in Williams’s critical
discussion of Bergmann’s The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, he writes:

Language is an interesting fact in its own right, like asthma, but its study is no spell to
open the treasure house of truth. No important philosophy can be corrected by verbalisms,
because important philosophy, right or wrong, is not done with words but by vast
imaginative excursions, as an artist envisages a picture or an inventor a machine. Linguism
was the latest of the transcendentalisms by which philosophers have sought a backdoor
access to the universe, away from the stare of the sciences, in our own intellectual apparatus.
But the convolutions of language are less reliable auspices than, say, the entrails of birds
except as it may already have been wrought to fit the facts. (Williams 1955, 650–1)

Williams thinks it misguided to appeal to matters of language in settling meta-

physical problems or questions, a common doctrine of ordinary language philos-
ophy and the later Wittgenstein. Williams argues that language is just one part of
the world. Thus there is no reason to privilege it over anything else or infer from
it some fact about the ultimate nature of reality. Contemporary metaphysics has
taken on to some extent the idea that real metaphysics mustn’t solely involve an
examination of language and the meaning of our words. Current debates about
truthmaking, grounding, and fundamentality, for example, are often premised
on the idea that we cannot read ontology off language.