Paul Horwich

Who is Paul Horwich?

Paul Horwich is a British analytic philosopher at New York University, whose work includes writings on causality, the philosophy of language and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Horwich earned his PhD from Cornell University; his thesis advisor was Richard Boyd. He has previously taught at MIT, University College London, and CUNY Graduate Center.

The work for which he is best known, Truth, presented a detailed defence of the minimalistic variant of the deflationary theory of truth. He is opposed to appealing to reference and truth to explicate meaning, and so has defended a naturalistic use theory of meaning in his book Meaning. Other concepts he has advanced are a probabilistic account of scientific methodology and a unified explanation of temporally asymmetric phenomena.

In the context of philosophical speculations about time travel, Horwich coined the term autoinfanticide to describe a scenario, depicting a variant of the grandfather paradox, in which a person goes back in time and deliberately or inadvertently kills his or her infant self, although he malformed the word as "autofanticide".