The Review of Analytic Philosophy (RAP) deserves warm applause at its entry onto the world stage as a new international journal of philosophy. Over the past forty years, the most striking and progressive development in world philosophy has been the spread, at first gradual and now rapid, of the analytic tradition across the globe. Like mathematics and natural science, analytic philosophy transcends national boundaries and benefits from diversity in culture, race, and gender, helping it overcome narrow prejudices. Although analytic philosophy is often associated with the English language, that is an accident of history, a product of those forces which made English the international language of science, just as for centuries Latin was the language of scholarship throughout Western Europe. Analytic philosophy can be written and spoken in any language, and increasingly is. For the present, however, those who wish to communicate with the widest global audience normally write in English. As in science, it is the role of the international community of philosophers to maintain the highest standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, and rigour, but also to reward creativity and the capacity to provide intellectual delight.
I have been very happy to witness the great advance of analytic philosophy in Japan in particular, not least through the good work of my old friend with strong Oxford connections Professor Masaki Ichinose, a fitting Editor-in-Chief of an international journal such as RAP, supported by four distinguished Associate Editors—all of whom I know well—based in China, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. I am also delighted to have an ex-student, Dr Richard Dietz, on the Editorial Board. RAP will surely act as both a showcase for analytic philosophy in Japan and a platform for its dialogue with philosophy in other countries. Especially for young philosophers in Japan and elsewhere in Asia with something to say, it will provide an excellent opportunity to say it to an international readership. I sincerely welcome RAP and wish it all possible success.
Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University since 2000 and Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale since 2018. His books include Identity and Discrimination, Vagueness, Knowledge and its Limits, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Tetralogue, Doing Philosophy, and Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals.
