Debating the a Priori

What kind of knowledge could be obtainable just by thinking? Debating the A Priori presents a series of exchanges between two leading philosophers on how to answer this question. In this extended debate, Boghossian and Williamson contribute alternating chapters which develop radically contrasting views and present detailed replies to each other’s arguments. A central case is the nature of basic logical knowledge and the justification for basic deductive inferences, but the arguments range widely across epistemology, the philosophy of language, and metaphilosophy. The debate takes in the status of the distinctions between analytic and synthetic and between a priori and a posteriori, as well as problems concerning the conditions for linguistic understanding and competence, and the question of what it might be to grasp a concept or to have an intuition. Both authors explore implications for how philosophy itself works, or should work. The result vividly exposes some of the main fault lines in contemporary philosophy, concerning the relation between reason and experience, the status of basic beliefs, the nature of concepts and intuitions, the role of language in our understanding of the world, how to study knowledge, and what it is to do philosophy. Both authors provide conclusions which sum up their positions and place the arguments in context. Their lively and engaging exchanges allow the reader to follow up-close how a philosophical debatte evolves.

Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University, Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College Oxford. He was previously Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, and has also taught at Trinity College Dublin, and as a visitor at MIT, Princeton, the Australian
National University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and elsewhere. He has published Identity and Discrimination (Wiley-Blackwell, 1990), Vagueness (Routledge, 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Clarendon Press, 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), Modal Logic as
Metaphysics (OUP, 2013), Tetralogue: I’m Right, You’re Wrong (OUP, 2015), Suppose and Tell (OUP, 2020), and many articles on logic and philosophy.

Paul A. Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University and the director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. He has also taught at Michigan, Princeton, Birmingham and the Ecole Normale Superieure. His research interests are primarily in epistemology and the philosophy of
mind, although he has written on a wide range of topics, including: color, rule-following, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music and the concept of genocide. He is the author of Fear of Knowledge (2006) and Content and
Justification (2008). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.