Timothy Williamson is at Yale this year; Fudan is holding a congress on his work

Timothy Williamson, one of the most argued-over figures in contemporary epistemology, is at Yale University in 2026 as A. Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor. He spoke at the Yale philosophy department colloquium on 6 April 2026.

"Knowledge first"#

Williamson's name is attached to Knowledge and Its Limits (2000), regarded as a turning point in epistemology. The book's central claim reverses a century-old habit in the field.

The traditional approach tries to break knowledge into parts: knowledge = truth + belief + justification (plus a repair). That programme, on Williamson's account, has failed. Knowledge is a basic mental state that cannot be decomposed into simpler parts; the reverse is true — concepts like belief and justification should be explained in terms of knowledge.

The position is known as knowledge-first epistemology and has opened one of the field's most productive lines of argument over the past twenty-five years.

Shanghai in November#

Fudan University in Shanghai is holding a congress titled "Timothy Williamson Encountering Chinese Philosophy" on 6-7 November 2026. Scholars of Chinese philosophy will engage critically with Williamson's work from within their own tradition, and Williamson will reply.

The event is one of several signs of increasing contact between analytic philosophy and Chinese philosophy. In an interview published in the 2026 issue of Studies in Logic, Williamson discussed the points at which knowledge-first epistemology meets Chinese epistemology.

On vagueness#

Williamson's other well-known thesis concerns vagueness. In Vagueness (1994) he argues that vague words such as "bald" or "heap" do have sharp boundaries — but that those boundaries cannot be known by us. Vagueness is a deficiency in our knowledge, not in the world. The view is known as epistemicism and is still vigorously debated.