Timothy Williamson - Biography#

Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University since 2000. Since 2018 he has also been Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University, teaching there five weeks a year. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and metaphilosophy. He 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 (Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Tetralogue (Oxford 2015), Doing Philosophy (Oxford 2018), Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (Oxford 2020), and (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori (Oxford 2020), and over 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 critical essays on his work with his replies. He has been the supervisor or co-supervisor of at least 48 successful doctoral theses at Oxford and elsewhere.

Of British nationality, Professor Williamson 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, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 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, and Tang Chun-I visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Professor Williamson 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 member of the Institut International de Philosophie, a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Belgrade and Bucharest.