Timothy Williamson

The Philosophy of Philosophy


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of each exchange – altogether, with nearly thirty philosophers, based in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of course, to judge properly whether I have been fair to my interlocutors, readers will have to read their side too. In any case, I am deeply grateful to all those who have spent so much time and effort carefully reading my work and articulating their responses.

      Sections 2 to 5 of this Preface briefly introduce the new response-mode material. Section 1 concerns the more spontaneous sections.

       1. Widening the picture

      My deepest instincts about the nature of philosophy have changed little over my career. For instance, I recall thinking as an undergraduate that transposing philosophical questions from the material to the formal mode, Carnap’s way of unmasking them as inviting linguistic decisions, really just disguised quite intelligible non-linguistic questions behind linguistic masks. Taken all the way, the “Linguistic Turn” struck me as in practice not clarifying but obscuring. Such critical instincts are manifest in The Philosophy of Philosophy.

      A recent side interest, which played no role in the first edition, has been the surprisingly effective dialectical role of moral and political considerations in philosophical debates which seem to have nothing specifically to do with the moral or political – for example, over general relativism, general skepticism, and general internalism in epistemology. The story of how I first came to notice this phenomenon tempts me into a digression.