postmodernist claims about the unrealistic nature of an objective truth, Lawson emphasises the need for “post-realism”. He argues that postmodernism is made incoherent by self-reference and ‘associated project of describing the relationship between language and the world.’ Lawson’s theory of “closure” responds to his rejection of realism and postmodernism, by proposing that the world is open and complex, but that it is enclosed by defined limits such as language and meaning. As Patrick Dillon says, ‘Closure can be understood as the imposition of fixity on openness. The closing of that which is open. […] Through closure there are things’. The theory shifts the focus of metaphysics away from language and towards an exploration of the tension between openness and closure. Given Lawson’s earlier work on self-reference, an important element of the theory of “closure” is its own self-referential nature. The framework of closure enables Lawson to claim that he provides an account of the relationship between language and the world that does not rely on reference and which he argues overcomes the problem of how language is hooked onto the world that beset twentieth century philosophy. One of the consequences of the theory is that philosophical oppositions, between language and the world, fact and value, are no longer regarded as oppositions. Lawson proposes that science is 'driven by the search for closure’, whilst art is described as 'the pursuit of openness and the avoidance of closure', demonstrating that the two are not in opposition to one another but rather in different relationships to openness and closure. Books In Reflexivity, Lawson argued that self-reference was central to contemporary philosophy. Using Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as the main examples, he sought to show that reflexivity was the primary motor of their work. It was implicit that similar arguments could be applied to Wittgenstein and the analytic tradition. The introduction to Closure extends the arguments put forward in Reflexivity to the broader philosophical tradition. It argues that issues of self-reference undermine currently available philosophical positions. The main body of the book describes the process of closure and the means by which people can intervene in the world and seemingly understand it. In doing so it seeks to demonstrate that meaning and understanding are not dependent on notions of reference and truth, arguing that although there is nothing in common between closure and openness this does not limit the ability to intervene successfully in