Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson is Senior Research and Teaching Fellow in Philosophy and Emeritus Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of New College Oxford. He was the Wykeham Professor of Logic from 2000 to 2023, He was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1955. After an undergraduate degree in mathematics and philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy, both at Oxford, he was a lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, a fellow and tutor at University College Oxford, and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), a visiting scholar at the centre for advanced study in Oslo, a Nelson distinguished professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Townsend Visitor at Berkeley and Tang Chun-I visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Williamson gave a Henriette Hertz lecture at the British Academy in 1996, the 1998 Weatherhead Lecture in Philosophy of Language at Tulane, the 2001 Jacobsen Lecture in London, the 2004 Skolem Lecture in Oslo, the 2005 Jack Smart Lecture in Canberra, the 2005 Blackwell Brown Lectures at Brown University, the 2006 Wedberg Lectures in Stockholm, the 2006 Gaos Lectures in Mexico City, the Hempel Lectures at Princeton in 2006, the 2009 Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, the 2010 Mesthene Lecture at Rutgers, the 2012 Ortlieb Lecture at Claremont, the 2012 Petrus Hispanus Lectures in Lisbon, the 2012 George Myro Lecture at Berkeley, the 2013 Hägerstrom Lectures in Uppsala, the 2013 Kim Young-Jung Lectures at Seoul National University, a Nanqiang Lecture at Xiamen University in 2014, the 2015 Bergmann Lecture at the University of Iowa, the 2015 Beth Lecture in Amsterdam, the 2015 Ruth Manor Memorial Lecture at the University of Tel-Aviv, the 2016 Kripke Lecture at CUNY, the 2016 Logic Lecture at the University of Connecticut, the 2016 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, the 2016 Wade Memorial Lecture at St Louis University, the 2016 Sainsbury Lecture at King’s College London, the 2017 Whitehead Lectures at Harvard, the 2018 Casalegno Lectures at the University of Milan, the 2018 Frege Lectures at the University of Tartu, the 2019 Sanders Lecture at the American Philosophical Association Central Division, the 2021 LLC Lecture at the University of Turin, the 2022 Rutgers Lectures, and the 2023 Lillehammer Lecture in Philosophy at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. For 2009-12 he held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He has been President of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association and Vice-President of the British Logic Colloquium. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, a member of the Academia Europaea, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Institut International de Philosophie, and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College Oxford. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Bucharest and Belgrade. Since 2016 he also teaches for some weeks each year at Yale University, since 2018 as Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor, and at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano. The Lauener-Stiftung is awarding him the 2024 Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.
Timothy Williamson is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell 1990, updated edition 2013), Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Tetralogue: I’m Right, You’re Wrong (Oxford 2015), Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning (Oxford 2018, paperback Philosophical Method: A Very Short Introduction 2020), Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (Oxford 2020), (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori (Oxford 2020), Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy (Oxford 2024), and Good as Usual: Anti-Exceptionalist Essays on Norms, Values, and Action (Oxford 2024), and more than two hundred academic articles. Williamson on Knowledge, edited by Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford 2009) and Williamson on Modality, edited by Mark McCullagh and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Routledge 2017) contain essays on his work with his replies. He has been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
Timothy Williamson is married to Ana Mladenović Williamson. His three children are Alice, Conrad and Arno.
Timothy Williamson is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell 1990, updated edition 2013), Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Tetralogue: I’m Right, You’re Wrong (Oxford 2015), Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning (Oxford 2018, paperback Philosophical Method: A Very Short Introduction 2020), Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (Oxford 2020), (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori (Oxford 2020), and more than two hundred articles. Williamson on Knowledge, edited by Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford 2009) and Williamson on Modality, edited by Mark McCullagh and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Routledge 2017) contain essays on his work with his replies. His work has been translated into Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
Papers
‘Is the a priori / a posteriori distinction superficial?’, (added 24.04.2024)
'Collective Imagining' (added 17.01.2024)
'Review essay on Kitcher’s What’s the Use of Philosophy' (added 17.01.2024)
‘Knowledge-first inferential evidence: a response to Dunn’ (added 22.11.2002)
‘Is Logic about Validity?’ (revised 16.11.2022)
"Where Did It Come From? Where Will It Go?" (revised 24.10.2022)
'Metametaphysics and Semantics' (added 24.11.2021)
'Epistemological Consequences of Frege Puzzles' (added 24.11.2021)
'Modal Epistemology and the Logic of Counterfactuals' (added 23.04.2021)
'Moral anti-exceptionalism' (added 18.02.2021)
'Disagreement in metaphysics' (added 05.02.2021)
'Accepting a logic, accepting a theory' (added 18.01.2021)
'Modal epistemology and the logic of counterfactuals' (added 18.01.2021)
(with Miroslava Trajkovski) 'Abduction, perception, emotion, feeling: body maps and pattern recognition' (added 18.01.2021)
'Review of Kit Fine, Vagueness: A Global Approach' (added 18.01.2021)
'Review of Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Approaches' (added 18.01.2021)
'The kk principle and rotational symmetry' (new version, added 17.06.2020)
'knowledge_credence_and_the_strength_of_belief' (new version, added 01.06.2020)
'Non-Modal Normativity and Norms of Belief' (added 19.05.2020)
'Epistemic Ambivalence' (new version, added 19.05.2020)
'E = K, but what about R?' (added 27.04.2020)
'Indefinite Extensibility' (from 1998)
'Morally loaded cases in philosophy (added 13.05.2019)
'Supervaluationism and Good Reasoning' (revised 09.02.2018)
'Alternative Logics and Applied Mathematics' (revised 05.03.2018)
'Evidence of evidence in epistemic logic' (revised 04.09.2017)
'Counterpossibles in Metaphysics' (revised 12.09.2016)
'Modal Science' (revised 12.09.2016)
(with Jason Stanley) 'Skill' (added 26.02.2016)
'Model-building in philosophy' (added 10.11.2015)
'Acting on Knowledge' (revised 12.10.15)
'Absolute Provability and Safe Knowledge of Axioms' (revised 17.07.2015)
'Justifications, Excuses, and Sceptical Scenarios' (added 11.06.2015)
'Review of Peter Unger’s Empty Ideas' (added 20.01.15)
'Plato Goes Pop' (added 08.12.14)
'Review of Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas' (added 08.12.14)
'How did we get here from there? The transformation of analytic philosophy' (corrected 03.03.15)
'Gibbard on Meaning and Normativity' (added 29.10.2014)
'A Note on Gettier Cases in Epistemic Logic' (added 24.10.2014)
'Dummett on the Relation between Logics and Metalogics' (added 24.10.2014)
'Edgington on Possible Knowledge of Unknown Truth' (added 24.10.2014)
'Philosophical Criticisms of Experimental Philosophy' (added 24.10.2014)
'Semantic Paradoxes and Abductive Methodology' (added 24.10.2014)
'Knowing by imagining' (added 10.07.2013)
'Gettier Cases in Epistemic Logic' (added 26.10.2012)
'Review of Joshua Alexander, Experimental Philosophy' (added 24.09.2012)
'How deep is the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge?'(added 12.12.2011)
'Philosophical expertise and the burden of proof' (added 02.12.2010)
'Very improbable knowing' (added 02.12.2010)
'Necessitism, contingentism and plural quantification' (added 02.12.2010)
'Logic, metalogic and neutrality' (added 02.12.2010)
'Probability and Danger' (added 26.10.2009)
'Barcan Formulas in Second-Order Modal Logic' (added 03.07.2009)
'Conditionals and Actuality' (added 01.10.2008)
'Reply to John Hawthorne and Maria Lasonen-Aarnio' (added 01.10.2008)
'How Probable is an Infinite Sequence of Heads?' (added 29.06.2007)
'Absolute Identity and Absolute Generality' (added 28.06.2006)
'Why Epistemology Can't be Operationalized' (added 21.06.2006)
'Philosophical Knowledge and Knowledge of Counterfactuals' (added 19.06.2006)
'Stalnaker on the Interaction of Modality with Quantification and Identity' (added 02.02.2006)
'Conceptual Truth' (added 02.02.2006)
'Reference, Inference and the Semantics of Pejoratives' (added 30.01.2006)
'Indicative versus Subjunctive Conditionals, Congruential versus Non-Hyperintensional Contexts' (added 30.01.2006)
'Tennant’s Troubles' (added 30.01.2006)
(with Igor Douven) 'Generalizing the Lottery Paradox' (added 30.01.2006)
'Conditional Excluded Middle in Systems of Consequential Implication' (added 30.01.2006)
'On Being Justified in One’s Head' (added 27.04.2005)
'Probabilistic Anti-Luminosity' (deleted; see 'Why Epistemology Can't be Operationalized' above for new version)
'Armchair Philosophy, Metaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking' (restored 24.05.2005)
'Knowledge, Context and the Agent's Point of View' (restored 24.05.2005)
'Contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and knowledge of knowledge'
'Can Cognition be Factorised into Internal and External Components?'
'Replies to Commentators (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)'
'Philosophical 'Intuitions' and Scepticism about Judgement
'Some computational constraints in epistemic logic'
'Sosa on abilities, concepts and externalism'
'Truth, falsity and borderline cases'
'Replies to Commentators (Philosophical Books)' (no longer available)
Is the a priori / a posteriori distinction superficial?
Graduate class, Trinity Term 2023
Boghossian, Müller-Lyer, the Parrot, and the Nazi
Draft of Chapter 1 of Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy
Draft of Chapter 2 of Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy
Draft of Bibliography of Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy