Timothy Williamson (born 6 August 1955) is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and fellow of New College, Oxford. Education and career Born on 6 August 1955, Williamson's education began at Leighton Park School and continued at Henley Grammar School (now the Henley College). He then went to Balliol College, Oxford University. He graduated in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in mathematics and philosophy, and in 1980 with a doctorate in philosophy (DPhil) for a thesis entitled The Concept of Approximation to the Truth. Prior to taking up the Wykeham Professorship in 2000, Williamson was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh (1995–2000); fellow and lecturer in philosophy at University College, Oxford (1988–1994); and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin (1980–1988). He has been visiting professor at Yale University, Princeton University, MIT, the University of Michigan, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Since 2022 he is visiting professor at the Università della Svizzera Italiana. Philosophical work Williamson has contributed to analytic philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology. On vagueness, he holds a position known as epistemicism, which states that every seemingly vague predicate (like "bald" or "thin") actually has a sharp cutoff, which is impossible for us to know. For instance, there is some number of hairs such that anyone with that number is bald, and anyone with even one more hair is not. In actuality, this condition will be spelled out only partly in terms of numbers of hairs, but whatever measures are relevant will have some sharp cutoff. This solution to the difficult Sorites paradox was considered an astonishing and unacceptable consequence, but has become a relatively mainstream view since his defence of it. Williamson is fond of using the statement, "no one knows whether I am thin" to illustrate his view. In epistemology, Williamson suggests that the concept of knowledge is unanalysable. This went against the common trend in philosophical literature up to that point,