AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

11:00-11:55.   Inês Hipólito: Can one know something one doesn't care for? 'Knowing' in the Age of AI
12:00-12:55   Lunch
1:00-1:55       Jordi Fernández: Sartre on Why Existence Precedes Essence
2:00-2:55     Stephanie Collins: What is Structural Injustice?

Open to all Undergraduates, Honours Students, & Senior School Students.
Free ticketed event.

Organised by the AAP Undergraduate Committee, Winter School is a one-day event held alongside the AAP Conference.

Designed for undergraduate and senior secondary students with an interest in philosophy, Winter School provides an opportunity to hear from professional philosophers and learn more about philosophical study and research.

Conference Check-in desk open.

Conference Opening & Welcome

Prize Announcements for Annette Baier Prize, Innovation in Inclusive Curriculum Prize & Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist.

Take ‘individualism’ to combine an internalist locating of remembering, thinking, and feeling in the brain with a normative vision of agency as self-sufficiency. Constitutive dependence on resources beyond the skull and skin then appears as deficit: it’s fine to be in causal connection with other people, places, or artifacts, but the mature agent exhibits a form of autonomy that is independent rather than relational. This talk identifies neurocentrism and Eurocentrism as parallel expressions of a shared individualist picture which has had significant costs. Displacement, dispossession, and certain forms of cultural assimilation are forms of cognitive and epistemic violence precisely because bodies, lands, and shared practices are not external or dispensable to minds — they are partly constitutive of remembering, feeling, and knowing.
A distributed approach to mind makes these costs visible. Our reliance on the distinctive resources of dynamic cognitive ecologies brings risk and vulnerability. Scaffolding (from historical cognitive tools through to GPS and AI) is not optional, but it can be differentially distributed, manipulated, or dismantled.
Memory is the key site of contestation. We need to bear witness to real past injustices while acknowledging that remembering is constructive and selective, and that traces of past events are often fragmentary, ambiguous, or destroyed. Some see constructive processes and causal connections with the past as competing commitments. I argue in contrast that construction is the means by which we make epistemic and affective contact with past events, not an obstacle to that access.
Better engagements with difficult past events do not seek a single canonical version. They flaunt their constructedness, embrace ongoing transformation, and enact maintenance responsibly, in archival and heritage practice as in individual and collective remembering. Constructing the past faithfully enough and sustaining the cognitive ecological conditions to support responsible future-oriented action are closely intertwined projects. Similar principles apply across distinctive domains. Cognitive and affective life is already scaffolded, interdependent, and thus vulnerable, in ways that individualism both distorts and undermines. A distributed approach helps to integrate cognitive and political projects, to identify damage done by neurocentrism and Eurocentrism alike, and to support the slow, shared work of forging viable alternatives.

Opening Reception for all attendees following the Presidential Address