Timothy Williamson

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Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson, FBA, FRSE, (born Uppsala, Sweden, 6 August 1955) is a distinguished British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He is currently 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)

1 Education
2 Publications
3 Distinctive Philosophical Contribution
4 Awards
5 External links

[edit] Education

Timothy Williamson's university education was entirely at 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".

[edit] Publications

Identity and Discrimination, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Vagueness, London: Routledge, 1994.
Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
The Philosophy of Philosophy, forthcoming: Blackwell.
More than 120 articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

[edit] Distinctive Philosophical Contribution

Timothy Williamson's work in analytical philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology constitutes an important contribution to these diverse branches of thought.

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 gives a solution to the sorites paradox that used to be considered extremely crazy, 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, despite the fact that it is quite obvious to anyone who has seen him that he is in fact thin. The relevence of this fact for empistemicism about vagueness is unclear.

In epistemology, he suggests that the concept of knowledge is unanalyzable. In particular, knowledge is not justified true belief satisfying some fourth condition. He agrees that knowledge entails justification, entails truth, and entails belief, but 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.