News & Events Distinguished Philosopher Timothy Williamson to Lecture at Amherst College March 5

February 23, 2009                
             
AMHERST, Mass.—Timothy Williamson, the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, will give a talk titled “Probability and Danger” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 5, in the  Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College. Organized by the college’s Department of Philosophy and funded by the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science, the lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the talk in the lobby of Converse.

Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford since 2000. Previously, he held appointments at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. He has served as a visiting professor at academic institutions all over the world, including MIT, Princeton, the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury and the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo. In addition, he has been the Nelson Distinguished Professor at the University of Michigan, the Townsend Visitor at the University of California, and the Tang Chun-I Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Williamson’s main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of four books—Identity and Discrimination, Vagueness, Knowledge and its Limits and The Philosophy of Philosophy—and more than 120 articles. From 2009 to 2012, he will hold a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to write a book on philosophical applications of second-order modal logic.

The Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science was established in 1983 by Carol Micken and John I. Forry ’66 to promote the study of philosophical issues arising out of new developments in the sciences, including mathematics, and issues in the philosophy and history of science.