Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. In a tradition going back to Plato, Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore questions about truth and falsity, and knowledge and belief. Is truth always relative to a point of view? Is every ...

In his Rutgers Lectures, Timothy Williamson explains how contemporary philosophy suffers from a widespread pathology known as overfitting to natural and social scientists, but little understood by most philosophers. Overfitting involves an insufficiently critical attitude towards data, which leads to over-complicated theories designed to fit what are in fact errors in the data. In philosophy, the data typically comprise verdicts on hypothetical or actual cases. Errors in such data...

What kind of knowledge could be obtainable just by thinking? Debating the A Priori presents a series of exchanges between two leading philosophers on how to answer this question. In this extended debate, Boghossian and Williamson contribute alternating chapters which develop radically contrasting views and present detailed replies to each other's arguments. A central case is the nature of basic logical knowledge and the justification for basic deductive inferences, but the argumen...

Good as Usual argues that contemporary discussion on the nature of norms and values goes wrong by treating them as exceptional and mysterious, since they do not fit popular philosophical assumptions about metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. Timothy Williamson shows that, once we throw out those preconceived and outdated ideas, we can understand moral and evaluative features of reality as similar to its other features, and capable of being known and described...

What does 'if' mean? It is one of the most commonly used words in the English language, in itself a sign to the importance of conditional thinking to human cognitive life. We make conditional statements, ask conditional questions, and issue conditional orders. We need to think and talk conditionally for many purposes, from everyday decision-making to mathematical proof. Yet the meaning of conditionals has been debated for thousands of years. Suppose and Tell brings together ideas ...

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither? 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...

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither? 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...

Before Wall Street, venture capital, or modern tech monopolies, a single Dutch corporation laid the blueprint for modern capitalism. In 1602, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie issued public shares, engineered market mechanics, and violently conquered the global spice trade. "The East India Monopoly" pulls back the curtain on the financial and military machinery of history's first megacorporation. Discover how an ambitious syndicate transformed volatile maritime risks into permanent equ...

Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical relations with contingency and change. In Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson argues for positive answers to those questions on the basis of an integrated approach to the issues, applying the technical resources of modal...

A care bundle is a group of specific, non-prescriptive, evidence-based components that, when performed collectively and reliably, have been established to improve patient outcomes. Emergency medicine care bundles support healthcare professionals in providing focused management plans for common presentations. They are explicitly focused on the initi

Vagueness, volume XX, contains twenty-seven essays, with issues covered including: nihilism, phenomenal sorites, degrees of truth, epistemicism, higher-order vagueness, contextualism, and intuitionism. Written by leading contemporary philosophers, these essays will be of interest to researchers in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics and epistemology; as well as those in natural language semantics, artificial intelligence and cognitive science more generally. A substant...

History taking and examination skills are vitally important in everyday practice. They are examined at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum and are constantly monitored at a postgraduate level. To become proficient in history taking, key questions should be asked to quickly understand the exact nature of the illness.This invaluable guide spec