Hilary Lawson

Hilary Lawson is an English philosopher and founder of the Institute of Art and Ideas. Lawson's philosophical work explores problems of self-reference and non-realist metaphysics. In his first book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (1985), he argued that self-referential paradoxes are central to twentieth-century philosophy and postmodernism, examining the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Wittgenstein. His later book Closure: A Story of Everything (2001) develops a comprehensive non-realist metaphysics, proposing that humans "close" the openness of the world through thought and language, creating what we experience as reality. The book has been described by Don Cupitt as "perhaps the first large-scale Anglo-Saxon non-realist 'metaphysics'". Lawson has also had a broadcasting and documentary film-making career and founded Television and Film Productions, now known as TVF Media.