Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson | |
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Doctoral students | |
Main interests | knowledge-first epistemology |
Influenced |
Timothy Williamson
Education and career
Born on 6 August 1955, Williamson's education began at
Williamson was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the
He has been visiting professor at
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005.
He is a
Since 2022 he is visiting professor at the Università della Svizzera Italiana.
Philosophical work
Williamson has contributed to analytic philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology.
On vagueness, he holds a position known as epistemicism, which states that every seemingly vague predicate (like "bald" or "thin") actually has a sharp cutoff, which is impossible for us to know. For instance, there is some number of hairs such that anyone with that number is bald, and anyone with even one more hair is not. In actuality, this condition will be spelled out only partly in terms of numbers of hairs, but whatever measures are relevant will have some sharp cutoff. This solution to the difficult Sorites paradox was considered an astonishing and unacceptable consequence, but has become a relatively mainstream view since his defence of it.[5] Williamson is fond of using the statement, "no one knows whether I am thin" to illustrate his view.[6]
In
Williamson also argues against the traditional distinction of
In
Publications
- Identity and Discrimination, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
- Vagueness, London: Routledge, 1994.
- Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007
- Williamson, Timothy (2022). The philosophy of philosophy (Second ed.). Hoboken, NJ. OCLC 1292744283.)
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- Williamson, Timothy (2022). The philosophy of philosophy (Second ed.). Hoboken, NJ.
- Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Tetralogue: I'm Right, You're Wrong, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Williamson has also published more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
References
- ^ Timothy Williamson – New College, Oxford
- ^ "Timothy Williamson". University of Oxford Faculty of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 April 2024.
- ^ British Academy Fellowship record Archived 6 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Gruppe 3: Idéfag" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Retrieved 16 January 2011.
- ^ Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Vagueness". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Phil 2511: Paradoxes
- ISBN 9780199256563.
- ^ Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001) 'Knowing How', The Journal of Philosophy 98(8): 411–444