Professor Michael Williams, ST Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow (March to August 2010)
Professor Michael Williams, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, has been awarded the ST Lee Visiting Professorial Fellowship for 2009/10. Professor Williams arrived to take up his Fellowship with us on 2 March for six months. We are delighted to welcome him.
Professor Williams is a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he taught at Yale, the University of Maryland and Northwestern. He has been the recipient of an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) fellowship and has held visiting positions at several universities including Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and MIT. His main areas of interest are epistemology (with special reference to skepticism), philosophy of language, and the history of modern philosophy. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Groundless Belief (1977; 2nd edition 1999), Unnatural Doubts (1992; 2nd edition 1996) and Problems of Knowledge (2001). He is currently working on Curious Researches: Reflections on Skepticism Ancient and Modern.
His research whilst here will be on “Pragmatism, minimalism and metaphysics”; he will be most closely affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy.
Professor Williams gave a lecture in the Dean's Seminar series on Wednesday, 21 April in room G37 (Senate House, south block, ground floor) from 12:30 to 14:00, under the title "Skepticism and the Space of Reasons". He also gave the ST Lee Visiting Professorial Lecture for 2009-10.
