 In 1999 he published an introductory book on Plato (Routledge). After 1999—when he was knighted—he began to be affected by the cancer which eventually killed him, but was still able to bring out Truth and Truthfulness in 2002. In this Williams argues, against such deniers of the possibility or importance of objective truth as the pragmatist Richard Rorty and the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, that it is indispensable to any human society to accept both truth and truthfulness as values, and sincerity and accuracy as corresponding virtues. Nor need such beliefs imply anything disreputably “metaphysical”, in the Nietzschean sense that they lead us into a covert worship of what Williams takes to be the will o’ the wisps of theism or Platonism. On the contrary, Williams argues, Nietzsche is on his side, not the deniers’, because Nietzsche himself believes that, while a vindicatory history of the notions of truth and truthfulness certainly has to be a naturalistic one, that is not to say that such a history is impossible. We can write this history if we can supply a “potential explanation”, to use Robert Nozick’s term (Nozick 1974: 7–9), of how these notions could have arisen. Williams himself attempts to provide such a potential explanation, which if plausible will—given the impossibility of recovering the actual history—provide us with as much insight as we can reasonably hope for into how the notions of truth and truthfulness did in fact arise. Such an understanding of truth and truthfulness, Williams concludes, cannot lead us back into the pre-modern philosophical Edens where truth and truthfulness are taken to have their origin in something entirely transcendent, such as Plato’s Forms, or God, or the cognitive powers of the Kantian subject; but it can lead us to the less elevated and more realistic hope that truth, as a human institution, will continue to sustain the virtues of truth “in something like the more courageous, intransigent, and socially effective forms that they have acquired over their history… and that the ways in which future people will come to make sense of things will enable them to see the truth and not be broken by it” (2002: 269).