The Metaphysics of Biological Essentialism
Seminar
The consensus against species having intrinsic essences has recently been challenged. The challengers have taken some account of criticisms of this essentialism, but they have not fully engaged with a range of criticisms, particularly those of Dupré, stemming from views of the metaphysics of…
2025 Myint Zan Law and Philosophy Lecture
Lecture
Leibniz's Dream: How to Automate Legal Reasoning with Artificial Intelligence In the 17th Century, the philosopher, mathematician, and lawyer Gottfried Leibniz envisioned the creation of a characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator that would enable reasoning in law and morals as…
Continuity, Catastrophic Risk, and Severe Uncertainty
Seminar
The Continuity axiom of expected utility theory implies that no catastrophe is so bad that one should not be willing to accept a gamble that might result in that catastrophe, as long as the gamble is sufficiently likely to instead result in some improvement on the status quo. This is implied by…
The Tragedy of the Conventions
Seminar
Many pressing social problems require coordinated changes across multiple interconnected domains. Climate action, for instance, requires simultaneous transitions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and consumer behaviour, where success in each domain depends on progress in others. In their…
Affect and the Body
Seminar
The paper examines the sense of body ownership through various empirical and clinical phenomena, including somatoparaphrenia and the Rubber Hand Illusion. These examples demonstrate that both the sense of ownership and its disownership are experiential phenomena, with specific neurological and…
Left-wing is best wing? The meaning and justification of political orientation.
Seminar
Political philosophers rarely analyse the categories of “left” and “right” in their own right, yet these labels structure much of public political debate. This talk, framed as a response to Joshi’s 2020 paper, What Are the Chances You’re Right About Everything? An Epistemic Challenge for Modern…
Topic Continuity, Realism, and The Objects of Philosophical Inquiry
Seminar
Some philosophical inquiry is directed at our thought and talk about a subject matter (e.g. how to understand the nature of moral thought, or our concept of consciousness), while other philosophical inquiry is directed towards understanding the “things themselves” (e.g. the nature of moral facts…