In his essay "The Legacy of Ancient Greek Philosophy," first published in 1981, Bernard Williams reassesses what ancient Greek thought bequeathed to modern Western philosophy.

"In philosophy, the Greeks inaugurated almost all major fields—metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and (albeit to a much more limited extent) philosophy of art. Not only did they establish these fields of inquiry, but they progressively identified many issues that would be recognized as fundamental in these areas.

Additionally, among those who laid the groundwork for these developments were two figures, Plato and Aristotle, who were always regarded, wherever in the Western world philosophy was known and studied, as leading figures of philosophical genius and breadth of achievement; and their influence, whether direct or indirect, more or less consciously, under an extraordinarily diverse array of interpretations, has consistently been present in the development that Western philosophical tradition has undergone since then.

Widely known for his studies in the field of ethics, the English philosopher particularly emphasizes the moral thought of the ancient Greeks, concluding that "it was not only different from most modern thought, especially that influenced by Christianity, but also much better formed."

He concludes: "Greek ethical thought, in many of its fundamental structures and, above all, in its inability to separate questions about how one should relate to others and to society from questions about what kind of life one ought to lead and what one fundamentally desires, represents one of the few sets of ideas that can help us now put ethical thought in honest contact with reality."