Timothy Williams est un auteur distingué dont les œuvres explorent les complexités des relations humaines et des normes sociétales. Son écriture se caractérise par une perspicacité aiguë et un langage précis, entraînant les lecteurs dans les profondeurs de la psyché humaine. Williams explore avec maestria les thèmes de l'identité, de la mémoire et de la recherche de sens dans un monde en constante évolution. Son style littéraire est à la fois intellectuellement stimulant et émotionnellement résonnant, faisant de lui un conteur captivant.
"Identity and Discrimination" by Timothy Williamson, originally published in 1990, is reissued with new material. It presents a rigorous theory connecting identity in metaphysics with indiscriminability in epistemology, utilizing epistemic logic and mathematical techniques to explore identity across time and possible worlds.
Commissario Trotti of Italy’s Polizia di Stato is called to the scene of the brutal murder of an old friend, schoolteacher Rosanna Belloni, who has been found bludgeoned in her apartment. Trotti’s superiors warn him off the case, but he is determined to hunt down the killer. There are lots of loose ends. Rosanna’s sister, a notorious drug addict, is missing. Is a recent, unexplained suicide in the River Po connected to the murder? Where does the discovery of a car dredged up from the delta fit in? Faced with a seemingly unsolvable mystery, Trotti must also grapple with obstructive colleagues and problems arising in his private life.
Northern Italy, 1993: After what seems like several lifetimes as a policeman in the Questura, Commissario Trotti is ready for retirement. Soon, he’ll be able to fulfill his dream of moving to the countryside villa he co-owns with his cousin, where his daily business will be tending to goats and chickens. But despite Trotti’s stubbornly old-fashioned investigative methods and his disregard for social niceties, there are several people trying to talk him out of retirement. Trotti’s boss offers him a golden opportunity as head of the Questura’s new child abuse division. Meanwhile, Fabrizio Bassi, a reckless, womanizing private detective who worked under Trotti years ago before being kicked off the force, approaches him for help. Bassi has been investigating the death of a murdered doctor, and he has a conspiracy theory that extends to the highest reaches of government. Trotti declines, annoyed by the request. But when Bassi is found in a ditch with a bullet in his head, Trotti decides to take on one last murder case after all.
What does 'if' mean? It is one of the most commonly used words in the English language, in itself a sign to the importance of conditional thinking to human cognitive life. We make conditional statements, ask conditional questions, and issue conditional orders. We need to think and talk conditionally for many purposes, from everyday decision-making to mathematical proof. Yet the meaning of conditionals has been debated for thousands of years. Suppose and Tell brings together ideas from philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to present a controversial new approach to understanding conditionals. It argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, methods which are fast and frugal and mostly, but not always, reliable. As a result philosophers and linguists have been led astray in theorizing about conditionals through trusting faulty data generated by such methods and prematurely rejecting simple theories on the basis of merely apparent counterexamples. This book shows how one such simple theory of conditionals can explain the data, and draws wider implications for the nature of meaning and its non-transparency to native speakers, vagueness in thought and language, and the need for semantics to attend to the unreliable heuristics underlying our judgments
Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental state. Williamson casts light on many philosophical problems: scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The result is a new way of doing epistemology, and a notable contribution also to the philosophy of mind.
As bold and provocative as its title, one of the worlds leading philosophers lays out in clear, accessible, and engaging terms his vision of philosophy, inviting the reader to agree or disagree, and thereby to enter into its practice. Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
The second volume in the Blackwell Brown Lectures in Philosophy, this volume offers an original and provocative take on the nature and methodology of philosophy.
A small-town kidnapping presents a major problem for Commissario Trotti—and draws us into CWA Award winner Timothy Williams' debut, set against the rich backdrop of a provincial Italian city. Northern Italy, 1978: Commissario Piero Trotti, trusted senior police investigator in an anonymous provincial city off the River Po, has two difficult cases to solve. A dismembered body has been found in the river, and it’s up to Trotti to figure out who the murder victim is. At the same time, an estranged friend approaches Trotti with a desperate personal plea: his six-year-old daughter—Trotti’s own goddaughter—has been kidnapped. In the wake of the high-profile kidnapping of Aldo Moro, president of Italy’s majority party, faith in law enforcement is at an all-time low, and it’s no surprise the distraught father isn’t willing to take this matter to the police.
Northern Italy, 1982: Inspector Piero Trotti is enjoying his breakfast at a café when gunmen drive up and shoot the man sitting at the next table. Was Trotti their intended target? He isn’t sure. The case falls under the jurisdiction of the local Carabinieri, but Trotti decides to make his own inquiries. The Puppeteer is the follow-up to CWA award-winner Timothy Williams’s dazzling crime fiction debut, Converging Parallels. This tautly written novel brings us to the depths of a corrupt, scheming Italian society in which bank officials, clergymen, masons, lawyers, and, of course, politicians are all suspect of resorting to criminal activity for personal gain. Only the police are presumed trustworthy, and even they are sorely divided by departmental rivalries and jealousies.
Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. In a tradition going back to Plato, Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore questions about truth and falsity, and knowledge and belief. Is truth always relative to a point of view? Is every opinion fallible? Such ideas have been used to combat dogmatism and intolerance, but are they compatible with taking each opposing point of view seriously? This book presupposes no prior acquaintance with philosophy, and introduces its concerns in an accessible and light-hearted way. Is one point of view really right and the other really wrong? That is for the reader to decide.