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\title{I'm Hilary Lawson, Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, Founder
of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival and post-realist philosopher. AMA!}



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  \date{April 23, 2026}


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\begin{abstract}
Hi reddit, I'm Hilary Lawson - post-realist philosopher, director of the
Institute of Art and Ideas and founder of the world's largest philosophy
and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn. Born and raised in Bristol,
England, I was awarded a scholarship to study PPE at Balliol College
Oxford . As a post-graduate I came to see paradoxes of self-reference as
the central philosophical issue and began a DPhil on The Reflexivity of
Discourse. This later became the basis for my first philosophical book
Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. Alongside my more
philosophical writing, I also pursued a media career following my
studies. Within a few years I had created my own prime time television
series `Where There's Life' with a weekly UK audience in excess of ten
million. In 1982, I went on to co-author a book based on the series and
was appointed Editor of Programmes and later Deputy Chief Executive at
the television station TV-am. Meanwhile I continued to develop my
philosophical thinking and had initial sketches of the theory later to
become Closure. In 1985 I wrote Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament
as part of a series on modern European thought. In the book, I argued
that the paradoxes of self-reference are central to philosophy and drive
the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In the late 1980s I
founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary and
current affairs programming, including Channel 4's flagship
international current affairs programme, The World This Week. I was
editor of the programme, which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. The
programme predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia
and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, amongst its other laudable
achievements. In the 1990s, I focused on writing Closure. It took a
decade to complete and was published in 2001. The book has been
described as the first non-realist metaphysics. Having begun my
philosophical career as a proponent of postmodernism, latterly I became
a critic arguing for the necessity of an overall framework and the need
to move on from a focus on language. Closure proposes that the human
condition is to find ourselves on the cusp of openness and closure. The
world is open and we, along with other living organisms, are able to
apprehend and make sense of it through the process of closure. I would
define closure as the holding of that which is different as one and the
same. Human experience is seen to be the result of successive layers of
closure, which I consider to be preliminary, sensory and inter-sensory
closure. The highest level of closure, inter-sensory closure realises
language and thought. The theory shifts the focus of philosophy away
from language and towards an exploration of the relationship between
openness and closure. An important element of the theory of closure is
its own self-referential character. I founded the Institute of Art and
Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part
of cultural life. Our website IAI.tv, which posts to the sub, was
launched in 2011. We then moved to publishing articles in 2013 and free
philosophy courses on IAI Academy in 2014. Links of Interest: Tickets
and lineup for HowTheLightGetsIn 2018 can be found here - discounts
available for students and U25s. Routledge has partnered with the IAI to
offer a generous 20\% off all their philosophy books and a free giveaway
each month. Click here for details. After the End of Truth: A debate
with Hannah Dawson (KCL) and John Searle (Berkeley) on objective truth
and alternative facts What Machines Can't Do \textbar{} Hilary Lawson in
debate with David Chalmers (NYU) and cognitive scientist and sex robot
expert Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths) on the question of machine minds After
Relativism: A debate on the pitfalls of relativism and potential
solutions with Simon Blackburn and Michela Massimi%
\end{abstract}%



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