Professor Timothy Williamson: Is Philosophy a Science?

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

In this lecture, Professor Timothy Williamson will discuss different views of the relation between philosophy and science over the past century, what it might mean to call philosophy a science, and whether philosophy makes progress as sciences are supposed to do. Professor Williamson will explain how philosophy can be a science in a broad sense, though neither a natural science (like physics or biology) nor a social science (like economics or sociology). In that respect, it resembles both mathematics and history. Ways will be considered of making philosophy more scientific.

Timothy Williamson is a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow and Emeritus Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, Fellow of New College Oxford, and Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale. He previously taught at Edinburgh University, University College Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin, and held visiting positions at MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Australian National University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Canterbury (New Zealand), and UNAM (Mexico). His books include Identity and Discrimination, Vagueness; Knowledge and its Limits; The Philosophy of Philosophy; Modal Logic as Metaphysics; Tetralogue: I’m Right, You’re Wrong; Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning; Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals; Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy; Good as Usual: Anti-Exceptionalist Essays on Values, Norms and Action; (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori. He was awarded the 2024 Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy.