You're listening to the Partially Examine Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point

set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 354 is something like, how can we apply insights from the philosophy

of science to philosophy itself?

We're speaking today to Oxford Philosophy Professor Timothy Williamson by the first chapters

of his new book, Overfitting and Juristics in Philosophy.

More information about the text and the podcast, please see Partially ExamineLife.com.

This is Mark Lintonmeyer, trying to graph the employment statistics for the analysis industry in Madison,com. This is Mark Lintonmeyer trying to graph the employment statistics

for the analysis industry in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Alwin, trying to get fit, but not overfit in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I am Tim Williams, and I am an Alpsvid philosopher. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.

We really had enjoyed covering you in the third person, in your absence, a while ago.

And we like to, when we do that, to see what the philosopher is doing now.

And you had pointed out two different books, plus it seems like you're always doing many, many things.

And so this, can you say a little about how this overfitting in heuristics in philosophy book

is fitting in with your overall philosophy of philosophy, your various strands of research?

My very general approach to the philosophy of philosophy is that philosophy is not so different from other disciplines,

other sciences, in a very broad sense of science that includes mathematics and history as well as

the natural and social sciences. And so that, I mean, that's an approach which I call anti-exceptionalism.

And so in this new book, part of what I'm doing is arguing that some specific ideas,

which are quite well known in a lot of the sciences,

are about certain kinds of intellectual pathology are applicable to philosophy as well. And

...