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Abstract Based on the ancient Greek tragedy and Homer’s epic, Bernard Williams discovered the ten- sion between necessity and chance, individual and tradition, history and the present to develop his core philosophical concepts. As a result, literary works tell the story about the moral community with its imaginary moral picture, that is, with literary imagination as the medium, a moral community that emphasizes both personal moral emotions and public moral rules, and pursues consensus of moral value has been constructed. This moral community shows the paradigm of lit- erary interpretation between literary experience and philosophical theory, which is used to analyze Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and thus present Williams’s literary thoughts: first, from the perspective of ethics, literature is a moral practice that arouses readers’ ethical identity to face the necessity; second, from the perspective of political philosophy, literature is a public field of dialogue and negotiation between individuals and traditional values; third, from the perspective of existentialism, literature is the consensus carrier that presents the whole moral life of human beings through daily experience. Thus, literature is an aesthetic practice of community concept.
Key words : Bernard Williams; moral community; literary thought; Beckett; Murphy
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