In 1944 he was decorated with the DSC for torpedoing a German destroyer off the French coast, part of an action which defeated the only remaining surface force that might have interfered with the Normandy landings.

[1] On 26 July 1999, eleven weeks after completing his book Human Freedom after Darwin, Watkins died of a heart attack while sailing his boat, Xantippe, on the Salcombe estuary, South Devon, England.

These profound results in applied elementary logic...represented an important corrective to positivist teachings about the meaninglessness of metaphysics and of normative claims".

At an international symposium on Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge held in London in 1965,[7] Watkins replied to a paper in which Thomas S. Kuhn had compared his own theory of scientific revolutions with Popper's falsificationism.

Besides those about the influence of metaphysics on science, Watkins wrote classic and much-anthologised papers about methodological individualism, and about historical explanation.