Simon Wimmer
Simon Wimmer
I'm an assistant professor at Julia Zakkou's chair in epistemology and philosophy of language at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick in January 2020 and was an assistant professor at TU Dortmund from April 2020 to March 2024. Thanks to funding from the Rudolf Chaudoire foundation, the Fritz Thyssen foundation, the DAAD, and the University of Toronto, I also spent time at Oxford, Cornell, Bochum, Cologne, and Toronto.

I work on knowledge, belief, and their relation. I argue that knowledge is not just a kind of belief and that belief cannot be defined in terms of knowledge. In connected historical work, I reconstruct Oxford Realist arguments that knowledge is altogether indefinable and that belief is not a fundamental mental kind. In interdisciplinary work with linguistics and computer science, I use cross-linguistic data and experiments with artificial neural networks to determine whether knowledge relates one to facts, rather than propositions.

I have taught in various formats, from logic lectures with 100+ students down to small group seminars and individual tutorials. My teaching aims to expand the canon by covering marginalized voices and global traditions. For instance, in a cross-cultural epistemology course, my students work through how communities around the world (e.g., in West Africa, Turkey, and Korea) attribute and conceptualize knowledge; and in a global philosophy course on mistakes my students and I discuss Kalam, Nyaya, and Xunzi, among others.

I'm originally from Austria, but lived in the UK for most of my adult life. In my free time, I enjoy learning about history, cooking and trying new foods, as well as walking and cycling with my wife and fellow philosopher Giulia Martina.

Email - PhilPeople

Publications

Articles

If to know the fact that p is not just to know that p, we get an epistemic dilemma, accepted for Epistemic Dilemmas and Epistemic Normativity, edited by Martin Grajner and Eva Schmidt. Routledge.

Contrafactives, learnability, and production, with David Strohmaier, Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, 3: 395-410 (2025).

Belief-in is belief-that with affectivity and evidentiality, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28: 961-979 (2024).

Believe is not a propositional attitude verb, Proceedings of the 24th Amsterdam Colloquium: 393-400 (2024).

Cook Wilson on judgement, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 32(1): 126-49 (2024).

Contrafactives and learnability: an experiment with propositional constants with David Strohmaier, Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics: 67-82 (2023).

Ways to knowledge-first believe, Erkenntnis, 88: 1189-1205 (2023).

Contrafactives and learnability with David Strohmaier, Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium: 298-305. (2022).

Cook Wilson on knowledge and forms of thinking with Guy Longworth, Synthese 200, 276. (2022).

Cook Wilson on the indefinability of knowledge with Guy Longworth, European Journal of Philosophy 30(4): 1547–1564 (2022).

Reductive views of knowledge and the small difference principle, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 52(8): 777-788 (2022).

Belief does not entail a reasoning disposition, Synthese 199(5): 14975-91 (2021).

Knowledge-first believing the unknowable, Synthese 198(4): 3855–71 (2021).

What is it to be aware of your awareness of red? A review essay of Michelle Montague's The Given with Giulia Martina, Philosophical Psychology 30(7): 992–1012 (2017).

Reviews, open educational resources, blog posts.

Wissen kultur- und sprachübergreifend, LehrGut: Blog für philosophische Hochschullehre (2024)

Review of David Hunter, On Believing, Philosophical Quarterly, 73(3): 926-8 (2023).

Review of Michael Ayers, Knowing and Seeing, Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur 9(1): 22–32 (2021).

Forall x: Dortmund. Eine Einführung in die formale Logik with P.D. Magnus, Tim Button, J. Robert Loftis, Robert Trueman, Aaron Thomas-Bolduc, and Richard Zach (2021).
PDF of book - PDF of solutions booklet

Review of Clayton Bohnet, Logic and the limits of philosophy in Kant and Hegel with Tristan Kreetz, Kant Studies Online (2016).

Review of The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle with Tristan Kreetz, Dialectic, the journal of the University of York Philosophy Society (2013).
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Image by Natasha Korotkova
Image by Natasha Korotkova
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