Region Western philosophy Name Timothy Williamson Education University of Oxford | Role Philosopher Influenced by Ruth Barcan Marcus Influenced John Hawthorne | |
Born 6 August 1955 (age 68) ( 1955-08-06 ) Uppsala, Sweden Era Contemporary philosophy Main interests Philosophical logic
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Philosophy of language Notable ideas Epistemicism; Knowledge first; knowing through imagining Books Knowledge and Its Limits, The philosophy of philoso, Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Identity and discrimination, Tetralogue: I'm Right - You're Wr Similar People John Hawthorne, David Lewis, Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Ian Rumfitt | ||
Schools of thought Analytic philosophy | ||
Timothy williamson on truth and certainty
Timothy Williamson, (born 6 August 1955) is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.
Contents
- Timothy williamson on truth and certainty
- The plausibility of wittgenstein s metaphilosophy timothy williamson paul horwich
- Education
- Contributions to philosophy
- Publications
- References
He is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and fellow of New College, Oxford. He was previously Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh (1995–2000); fellow and lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Oxford (1988–1994); and lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin (1980–1988). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
The plausibility of wittgenstein s metaphilosophy timothy williamson paul horwich
Education
Timothy Williamson's education began at Leighton Park School and continued at Henley Grammar School. He then went to Oxford University. He graduated in 1976 with a B.A. (first class honours) in Mathematics and Philosophy, and in 1981 with a doctorate in philosophy (D.Phil.) for a thesis examining "The Concept of Approximation to the Truth".
Contributions to philosophy
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. That is, 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 precise cutoff. This solution to the difficult sorites paradox was considered an astonishing and unacceptable consequence, but has become a relatively mainstream view since his defense of it. Williamson is fond of using the statement, "no one knows whether I am thin" to illustrate his view.
In epistemology, he suggests that the concept of knowledge is unanalyzable. This goes against the common trend in philosophical literature up to that point, which was to argue that knowledge could be analysed into constituent concepts. (Typically this would be justified true belief plus an extra factor.) He agrees that knowledge entails justification, truth and belief, but argues that it is conceptually primitive. He accounts for the importance of belief by discussing its connections with knowledge, but avoids the disjunctivist position of saying that belief can be analyzed as the disjunction of knowledge with some distinct, non-factive mental state.
Publications
Williamson has also published more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.