Christopher Williams was born in Walsall[1] and was educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford where he took a First in Greats and became a convert to Roman Catholicism, a faith to which he was openly devoted for the rest of his life.
Planning to enter the Benedictine Order, he became a novice at Downside Abbey, but shortly thereafter was affected by polio which left him paralysed from the waist down.
Believing that such fundamental concepts as existence, truth and identity had been widely misunderstood by the philosophical tradition, and obfuscated especially by metaphysics, Williams attempted to show that they could be elucidated by a close analysis of the way those and related terms are actually used.
Williams was not, however, an ordinary language philosopher; rather, he produced painstaking analyses of the concepts couched in the terms of symbolic logic.
In this approach, founded in the logical work of Gottlob Frege, he was most immediately influenced by Arthur Prior and by his friend and fellow Roman Catholic philosopher Peter Geach.