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"Williamson, Timothy, author"
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Doing philosophy : from common curiosity to logical reasoning
\"In Doing Philosophy,Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigor can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Identity and discrimination
Identity and Discrimination
This updated edition of Identity and Discrimination, first published in 1990 and the first book by well-known philosopher Timothy Williamson, is now reissued with the inclusion of significant new material. This major work – influential in philosophy of perception and the theory of vagueness – continues in an original and rigorous way to highlight the necessity of discrimination and the thresholds which determine the approximate criteria of identity.
Williamson's proposal for an original and rigorous theory links identity, a relation central to metaphysics, and indiscriminability, a relation central to epistemology. He provides a distinctive cognitive account of the nature of discrimination, with important applications to the philosophy of perception and the theory of vagueness. The book pioneers the use of epistemic logic to solve the notorious paradoxes of indiscriminability, and develops the application of techniques from mathematical logic to understand issues about identity over time and across possible worlds.
eBook
Vagueness
If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is.
eBook
Tetralogue
Four people with radically different views meet on a train and talk about what they believe. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right; then doubts creep in. Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore the philosophical debate over whether one point of view can be right and the other wrong. He invites the reader to decide.
eBook
Knowledge and its limits
The book develops a conception of epistemology in which the notion of knowledge is explanatorily fundamental. It reverses the traditional programme of trying to analyse knowledge as a combination of truth, belief, and other factors, such as justification. Rather, belief is a state whose successful form is knowledge, and justification is on the basis of knowledge, which is acquainted with evidence. Knowing is as much a mental state as believing, but it is world‐involving because one can know only what is true; the book extends the externalist conception of mind from the contents of mental states to the attitudes to those contents. As with other mental states, one cannot always know whether one is in the state of knowing. It is argued that this is a special case of a much more general phenomenon; no non‐trivial conditions are such that one is always in a position to know that they obtain whenever they in fact do so. This result has disturbing implications for the nature of rationality, because one is not always in a position to know what it is rational to do. Traditional arguments for scepticism fail because they assume that one is always in a position to know what one's evidence is. The speech act of assertion is also governed by a norm of knowledge. A final chapter explores the limits on what can be known that are revealed by the so‐called paradox of knowability.
eBook
The Vienna Summit and its importance in international history
At the beginning of June 1961, the tensions of the Cold War were supposed to abate as both sides sought a resolution. The two most important men in the world, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, met for a summit in Vienna. Yet the high hopes were disappointed. Within months the Cold War had become very hot: Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall and a year later he sent missiles to Cuba to threaten the United States directly. Despite the fact that the Vienna Summit yielded barely any tangible results, it did lead to some very important developments. The superpowers came to see for the first time that there was only one way to escape from the atomic hell of their respective arsenals: dialogue. The \"peace through fear\" and the \"hotline\" between Washington and Moscow prevented an atomic confrontation. Austria successfully demonstrated its new role as neutral state and host when Vienna became a meeting place in the Cold War. In The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History international experts use new Russian and Western sources to analyze what really happened during this critical time and why the parties had a close shave with catastrophe.
eBook
Vagueness: an investigation into natural languages and the sorites paradox
If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is.
eBook