Horwich read Physics at Oxford, graduating in 1968, and earned his PhD in Philosophy from Cornell University in 1975 with a thesis on The Metric and Topology of Time, under the direction of Richard Boyd.
He began his academic career at MIT, where he taught from 1973 until 1994, when he took up a post at University College London.
He returned to the U.S. in 2000, to take up a chair at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Other concepts he has advanced are a probabilistic account of scientific methodology and a unified explanation of temporally asymmetric phenomena.
[2] In the context of philosophical speculations about time travel, Horwich coined the term autofanticide for a variant of the grandfather paradox, in which a person goes back in time and deliberately or inadvertently kills their infant self.