Hilary Lawson is an English philosopher and founder of the Institute of Art and Ideas. His theory of "closure" puts forward a non-realist metaphysics arguing that people close the openness of the world with thought and language. Lawson has also had a broadcasting and documentary film-making career and founded Television and Film Productions, now known as TVF Media. Biography Lawson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a first in PPE, and as a post-graduate began a DPhil on the problems of self-reference. This later became his book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (1985) as part of the series Problems of Modern European Thought in which he argued that self-referential paradoxes are central to twentieth century philosophy, and specifically post-modernism. Later, Lawson pursued a broadcasting career. As a writer and director he made documentaries, created the series Where There's Life and co-authored a book based on the series. At 28, he was appointed editor of programmes at TV-am. In the late 1980s he founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary and current affairs programming, including Channel 4's international current affairs programme, The World This Week. Lawson was editor of the programme which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. His book Closure was published in 2001. The book has been described by Don Cupitt as "perhaps the first largescale Anglo-Saxon non-realist 'metaphysics. Lawson founded the Institute of Art and Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part of cultural life. Philosophical work Initially influenced by postmodernism at the outset of his career, Lawson contributed to and co-edited the collection of essays Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Post-Modern World, which explored the philosophical core of the theory. He also published the pamphlet After Truth - A Post Modern Manifesto, written in collaboration with Hugh Tomlinson, the translator of Deleuze. The influence of a postmodern approach continued in his collaborations with the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who contributed to Lawson's BBC film Science...Fiction? in which Lawson argued that "science is not powerful because it is true, but true because it is powerful" and in Lawson's subsequent film on Plato entitled The First World. Rorty also contributed to Lawson's collection Dismantling Truth. These works demonstrate Lawson’s long-standing scepticism of realism, apparent in the last decade from his exchange of articles with Timothy Williamson and debates with analytic philosophers John Searle, Simon Blackburn, and others. Despite accepting the basic