Associate Professor Brian Hedden

Position: Associate Professor

School: School of Philosophy

Email: brian.hedden@anu.edu.au

Location: Level 6, RSSS Building, 146 Ellery Crescent

Qualification:

PhD MIT 2012

Personal website: https://brianhedden.wixsite.com/home

Biography
Research interests
Publications
Projects and grants

Brian Hedden received his A.B. in Philosophy from Princeton in 2006 and his PhD in Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. Before arriving at ANU, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford (2012-2014) and a permanent staff member at the University of Sydney (2015-2020). He is the author of Reasons without Persons (OUP, 2015), as well as articles in Mind, Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Analysis, Nous, and elsewhere. He has so far been awarded two major competitive grants from the Australian Research Council: a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) and a Discovery Project (DP), the latter joint with Mark Colyvan.

Brian Hedden’s research focuses primarily on the nature of rationality, including rational belief-formation and rational decision-making. There, he has written on time-slice-centric conceptions of rationality, the debate over evidential and causal decision theories, hindsight bias, Dutch Book arguments, and the objectivity of evidential support. He also works on related areas of ethics and political philosophy, including collective action problems, algorithmic fairness, and legal evidence.

Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time. Oxford University Press (2015).
‘On Statistical Criteria of Algorithmic Fairness,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs (forthcoming)
‘Consequentialism and Collective Action,’ Ethics 130, no 4 (2020): 530-54.
‘Introduction to Part Two: Rationality and Time,’ forthcoming in Andrea Sauchelli (ed), Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry, Routledge.
‘Reasons, Coherence, and Group Rationality,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99, no 3 (2019): 581–604.
‘Legal Probabilism: A Qualified Defense,’ with Mark Colyvan, Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no 4 (2019): 448–68.
‘Rationality and Synchronic Identity,’ Austalasian Journal of Philosophy 97, no 3 (2019): 544–58. ‘Hindsight Bias is not a Bias,’ Analysis 79, no 1 (2019): 43–52.
‘Author’s Introduction’ and ‘Reply to Critics,’ for a symposium on Reasons without Persons. Analysis 77, no 3 (2017): 569–71 and 607–18.
‘Should Juries Deliberate?,’ Social Epistemology 31, no 4 (2017): 368–86.
‘Uniqueness and Metaepistemology,’ with Daniel Greco, The Journal of Philosophy 113, no 8 (2016): 365–95.
‘Mental Processes and Synchronicity,’ Mind 125, no 499 (2016): 873-888.
‘Self-Reinforcing and Self-Frustrating Decisions,’ with Caspar Hare. Noûs 50, no 3 (2016): 604-628.
‘Does MITE Make Right? On Decision-Making Under Normative Uncertainty,’ In Russ Schafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 11 (2016). pp. 102-128.
‘A Defense of Objectivism about Evidential Support.’ Canadian Journal of Philosphy 45, no. 5-6 (2016): 716- 43.
‘Believing and Acting: Voluntary Control and the Pragmatic Theory of Belief,’ Logos and Episteme 6 no. 4 (2015): 495-513.
‘Time-Slice Rationality,’ Mind 124, no. 494 (2015): 449-491.
‘Options and Diachronic Tragedy,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90, no. 2 (2015): 423-451.
‘Incoherence without Exploitability,’ Noûs 47, no. 3 (2013): 482-495.
‘Options and the Subjective Ought,’ Philosophical Studies 158, no. 2 (2012): 343-360.