Colonialism is a thousand years old, starting from the Crusades (1100-1300) when Christian Europe tried to take the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Despite failing those wars, European colonialism came to dominate other countries further afield and has continued in different forms to the present day.
The ancient Aboriginal system came from a long-term experiment in human order making. The activity of order-making requires elements that come under the general heading of social, political, and spiritual design. The elements are Coherence, Proportionality, and Predictability (CPP), which emerged out of the creation, life process, reflection, and development of two collective life experiences - relationalism and survivalism. Through CPP, the development of the Metaphysical Identity begins.
Regional consensus-based decision making was based on a deliberate process of creating a collective, civilisational culture i.e., metaphysical identity, whereby members of a group begin to understand the multiplicity of beings, values, obligations and duties, particularly through the concept of beginning, that explains the existence of the universe – The Dreaming.
All the learned requirements of maturity, of being mature adults emerge out of relationalism and reflectivity, further, we, the autonomous beings learn that land looks after us, it grows us up, we look after land, this leads to a reciprocal, relational connection underpinned by a conscience. The first instance of what an Australian metaphysical identity is and further, could be.
Being a metaphysical identity, that is, being fully, completely and reflectively human or proper humanness, is a skill that must be learned, i.e., acquiring a proficiency in being an ethical human being with a functioning conscience. The difficulty of acquiring and maintaining this skill is that it’s a choice of the autonomous being. Learning and maintaining autonomous regard and the stewardship system helps in strengthening and stabilising community.
What if Australia had its own philosophy? If Australia began exploring what its metaphysical identity could be, then, maybe, a philosophy will emerge too.
The aim of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is to discover the first principles of human knowledge, that is, what must be known before anything else can be known. If we are to understand this work, it is important to understand the methodology he employs. Descartes does not reveal the method utilized in the Meditations in this work, nor in any of his other books.
It is only in the Replies to the Second Set of Objections that he explains the method he utilizes in this work - he calls this method ‘analysis’; ‘synthesis’ is the method of mathematics. I explain the method of ‘analysis’ contra ‘synthesis’, and the employment of ‘analysis’ in leading the mind to the first principles of human knowledge. Examples are provided by focusing on Descartes’ analytic proofs of his existence as a thinking thing (second meditation), and that God is his creator (third meditation). In neither case is the analytic proof inferential. Further, if no inference is involved in gaining knowledge of God, then the charge of circular reasoning (raised by Arnauld and others) is without merit. Finally, I show the importance of meditation for Descartes in arriving at the first principles of human knowledge."
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
The advent of ChatGPT, and the subsequent rapid improvement in the performance of what has become known as Generative AI, has led to many pundits declaring that AI will revolutionize education, as well as work, in the future. In this paper, we argue that enthusiasm for the use of AI in tertiary education is misplaced. A proper understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI suggests that it would be profoundly misguided to replace human teachers with AI, while the history of automation in other settings suggests that it is naïve to think that AI can be developed to assist human teachers without replacing them. The dream that AI could teach students effectively neglects the importance of ‘learning how’ in order to ‘learn that’, that teachers are also role models, and the social nature of education. To the extent that students need to learn how to use AI, they should do so in specialized study skills units. Rather than creating a market for dodgy educational AI by lowering their ambitions about what they can offer, universities should invest in smaller class sizes and teachers who are passionate about their disciplines. To flourish in the future, just as much as they do today, societies will need people who have learned to think and not—or not just—intelligent machines.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Philosophical logicians often develop a language and a semantics to represent and study a body of philosophically interesting sentences whose truth conditions are ontologically puzzling. Examples include: possible world semantics, situation semantics, impossible world semantics, Routley star semantics, possibility semantics, etc. The philosophical action takes place in the semantics, which includes set- and model-theoretic constructions and so assumes mathematics. By contrast, in object theory (OT), the philosophical work is carried out in an axiom and proof system that assumes no mathematics. The system is couched in 2nd-order quantified modal logic (with complex terms), extended with one new primitive. Existence and identity (for both individuals and relations) are defined and three axioms for abstract objects are stated. The system then allows one to prove in the object language what others stipulate in the semantics, without assuming any mathematics. In particular, one may to define and prove the basic principles governing possible worlds (Kripke), situations (Barwise/Perry), Routley-starred situations, impossible worlds (a la Nolan), and (Humberstone) possibilities. Though there are other examples as well, these may be of special interest for this conference.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
What is empty space? Philosophers in the tradition stemming from Newton, through say Bertrand Russell down to, say, David Lewis, have thought of empty space as a manifold of things called points, and a region of space as empty if no material thing is located at any of the points in that region. These points possess locations and stand in spatial relations to one another; that is, they are things that possess properties and relations (rather than being properties or relations in themselves). There is a rival tradition (stemming from Leibniz) that dispenses with any such things as ‘points of space’ and countenances only material things and properties or relations among them. We will discuss a third option: a property theory of space. Spaces in general (including for instance ‘colour space’) are manifolds of properties; and location space is a manifold of locational properties. This way of thinking opens the possibility of a true void, a region consisting of locations that are not occupied by anything at all—not even by ‘points.’
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-206
Does philosophy make progress? Although it may seem obvious that it does, there are sceptics—both within the discipline and beyond it—who question this. In response to such doubts, Stoljar (2017) argues that we are entitled to a “reasonable optimism” about philosophy’s capacity to advance. Stoljar notes that there are recurring patterns or types of philosophical problems that we have solved—such as boundary problems and constitutive problems—that indicate progress. Moreover, as philosophical subfields evolve, new questions and positions emerge—and that, in itself, can be seen as a form of progress. Philosophers may progress their fields by extending earlier arguments, refining existing views, or make what Kelley (2024) calls “philosophical moves.” For example, one might adopt a pluralist position in one field after observing it in another. Given that these moves, or styles of inquiry, could plausibly be learned and applied through pattern recognition, a question arises: could Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at such tasks, contribute to philosophical progress? In this paper, I argue they may be able to, by looking at issues from the self-knowledge literature. I also consider some of the ethical implications of LLM use in philosophy, including questions around authorship, privacy, and their environmental impact.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper interrogates the intricate distinction between human beings and persons by re-evaluating John Locke’s framework of personal identity. Whereas human beings are defined by biological continuity, persons, according to Locke, are constituted by psychological continuity—principally the continuity of memory and self-awareness. Locke’s theory posits that a person remains identical over time by virtue of an unbroken chain of conscious experiences, even when the physical body persists despite episodes of amnesia or altered consciousness. This perspective challenges the reduction of personhood to mere biological persistence, arguing instead for a dynamic conception of identity anchored in reflective awareness and moral responsibility. Nonetheless, the theory faces formidable challenges: the phenomenon of false memory, the episodic disruptions seen in severe amnesia, and the complexities introduced by conditions such as dissociative identity disorder. These issues raise critical questions about the stability and unity of psychological continuity. Ultimately, while Locke’s approach advances a compelling alternative to substance-based theories, it also underscores the need for further refinement to fully capture the multifaceted nature of personal identity.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The idea that scientific realism and anti-realism are, or are closely related to, epistemic stances (clusters of values, attitudes, goals and commitments), has grown in popularity following the work of van Fraassen, Chakravartty and others. Yet the dream of discovering a decisive stance-independent argument for scientific realism as a thesis – an argument that is, or should be, rationally compelling for anyone, whatever their prior philosophical commitments, who is willing to consider the arguments and evidence in an impartial way – dies hard, as recent attempts in this direction by Eronen, Strevens and others have shown. In this paper I argue these attempts all fail. All arguments for scientific realism as a thesis presuppose the realist stance. I also suggest that, paradoxically, arguments for versions of scientific anti-realism may also presuppose the realist stance, inasmuch as they assume that the specific realist thesis in question is on the table as a genuine option, even if it is ultimately rejected. For those who reject the realist stance, such realist theses are not even live options, so arguments against them are beside the point.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
A (legitimate) authoritative command provides its subject with a reason for action. Many also think it provides its subject with a peremptory reason to refrain from acting for certain kinds of countervailing reasons. When a father tells his daughter to go to bed, the consideration that she “doesn’t feel like it” is not only insufficiently weighty to challenge her father’s command, but is also a reason that ought to be excluded.
The capacity of commands to exclude competing reasons has received extensive discussion, most famously by Raz (1986). Less has been said of the nature this exclusion. How is the father’s command supposed to impact upon his daughter’s deliberation? What kind of weight does this exclusionary reason carry for its subject?
I propose that a command’s exclusionary force is a property that modulates in robustness. Some commands carry a more robust exclusionary force, in the sense that they continue to be relevant and retain exclusionary force across a wider range of circumstances, while other commands carry a more fragile exclusionary force, relevant over a narrower range of cases. This interpretation helps illuminate how authoritative directives can be both binding and non-absolute.
Epistemic deference (ED) is the practical and rational appeal to another agent as an epistemic authority, whose authority stems from pre-established legitimate expertise, experience, access to relevant evidence, and dependable systems of knowledge. However, within standpoint epistemology, there is a pushback against this norm. Olufemi Taiwo voices this resistance. In this paper, I critically examine Taiwo’s account of ED, which is characterised by conferring conversational authority and attentional goods to individuals based on superficial social identity markers to represent the marginalised. Accordingly, I argue that there is a fundamental definitional difference between Taiwo’s account of ED and how it is accounted for in epistemology. Based on this distinction, I contend that the failures attributed to Taiwo’s account — namely, that ED leads to epistemic complacency and the reinforcement of oppressive systems — are not inherent flaws of ED as an epistemic norm. Rather, they stem from Taiwo’s conceptualisation. I conclude by considering ED beyond elite spaces, demonstrating that it is indispensable so long as epistemically privileged standpoint is rooted in experience-based knowledge.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-262
There has been a recent proliferation of “AI Agents”: systems or programs that can operate in an increasingly autonomous manner. These systems raise an important question: do improvements in the capabilities of autonomous systems change the requirements for how we hold such systems – or their operators or designers – responsible for their outputs? Responsibility can be fruitfully connected to explainability – having the ability to explain an outcome helps in determining who, or what, should be held responsible for that outcome.
My talk will highlight how increasingly agentic systems pose challenges for pre-existing criteria for explainability. Specifically, I will examine how the increasing agentic features of algorithmic systems complicates the explanatory picture, and how different accounts of artificial agency can help to clarify these added complexities. I will conclude by considering how we should better understand the role of explanation in relation to increasingly complex explanatory contexts involving AI agents.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Can a theorem of pure mathematics definitively refute a philosophical view? According to one popular argument, the answer is yes. The theorem in question comes from model theory, and the philosophical view is functionalism: one of the most popular and well-studied views in the philosophy of mind. According to this argument, functionalism is logically inconsistent, and Beth’s definability theorem demonstrates this by showing that functionalism collapses into reductionism - exactly what functionalists purport to deny.
In this paper, we examine whether the argument really is as devastating as its proponents have claimed. Unfortunately for those hoping to refute functionalism in this way, we show that the argument fails for reasons both logical and philosophical. We conclude that at best, it simply fails to challenge any actually held functionalist views, and at worst, relies upon an equivocation concerning the relevant notion of definability in order to derive its conclusion.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The field of phenomenology is still undergoing healthy development over a hundred years since Edmund Husserl published Ideas. In this paper I explore how the emerging field of critical phenomenology both separates itself from and actively integrates classical phenomenological concepts. More specifically, I analyse how Husserl’s method lingers in contemporary critical approaches. Original concepts such as the natural attitude and the eidetic reduction remain central for current scholars, such as Gail Weiss and Sara Heinämaa, but are critiqued by others, such as Lisa Guenther and Johanna Oksala. By rethinking phenomenology though existentialism and Foucault, for example, current scholarship more broadly contextualises the phenomenological project. Indeed, the inclusion of historical, sociological, and anthropological discourses is fundamental to a materially grounded critical phenomenology. I argue that a well constructed critical phenomenology can remain faithful to Husserl while providing us with a sufficient critique of broader power structures to deliver a more holistic insight into personal experience. I discuss how ‘post-phenomenologists’ engage with Husserl’s work to ask whether the original tools ought to be discarded, or if they possess a certain power that helps us understand more about sexed, racialized, disabled, and classed experience.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Social metaphysicians have largely neglected to address what happens when a group loses all of its members. While Hanschmann (2023) argues that social groups can never be memberless, I argue that social entities like clubs, bands and sports teams can be temporarily memberless. Epstein (2015) points out that we have good reasons to accept that entities like the U.S. Supreme Court may persist, in some form, when they lose all their members for a short time and regain new members at a later date. I suggest that there are two plausible ways to account for temporary memberlessness: 1. We could say that social groups can persist without members or, 2. We could say that something persists through a period of memberlessness, but that it is not a social group. The second option may be attractive to those who endorse the social integrate model of social groups, which distinguishes between social groups as member-having entities and institutions more broadly. I argue that the best approach is to treat the property of 'being a social group' as a temporary property that institutions can have.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-206
This is a story of opportunities for field philosophy. Not a paper in the standard sense, more a travelogue of places that philosophers could venture and lend a hand.
Middle managers in the public sector face more philosophical challenges than you might realise. They interface between abstract policy and tangible implementation plans, they decide how the state meets the street, they filter and frame information for policy-making, they decide what matters and how it matters. They may be the enabler or the barrier to hostile actions like ‘robodebt’.
A few philosophers are already working on these challenges. Nancy Cartwright has been working with practitioners on a theory of evidence for evidence-based policy, Anna Alexandrova has worked with social services to co-design concepts of wellbeing with the people who use the service.
There are many ways that Australian philosophers could contribute to better thinking in the public sector through collaboration with middle managers.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The concept of narrative is widespread in the literature on dreams, spanning the humanities, psychology, and cognitive science. Yet, this term and its associated conceptual aspects often remain undefined and insufficiently investigated. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literature theory, and semiotics, there has been virtually no investigation of how preconceptions about the resemblance between fictional narratives and retrospective dream reports have shaped the philosophical debate on dreams and dreaming. This paper aims to address this gap. We argue that there is a pervasive tendency to metonymically assimilate fictional narratives first to dream reports and then to dreams themselves. As a result, features and devices typically associated with literary fiction are frequently used as a significant conceptual framework to understand dreams and the processes underlying their formation, encoding, and retrieval. To illuminate this tendency, we focus on two central categories in the philosophy of dreaming: authorship and composition. These categories often structure debates concerning the ontology and epistemology of dreams. By examining relevant cases in which these categories are employed to support divergent theoretical positions, we argue that similar accounts often rest on a shared—yet frequently unacknowledged—assumption: that dreams exhibit a narrative structure and that dreaming is, at its core, a process of narrative construction.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In this paper, I argue that there is a general class of label that purports to track problematic behaviours, beliefs, motives, or vices. I call these demeriting labels. Some examples are “liar”, “racist”, “tattletale”, “creep”, “virtue signaller”, “snowflake”, and “slob”. When someone is labelled, lead to social sanctions, tarnish their character, and block them from making conversational moves.
While demeriting labels sometimes have appropriate uses, they can be weaponised to misassign demerits to people innocent of wrongdoing. I worry that this makes demeriting labels particularly effective for the reproduction of social hierarchy, especially given that demeriting labels do not stick to all people with equal ease. For example, dominantly situated people can sometimes get away with bad behaviour because their social position grants them a Teflon coating that makes it harder to get demeriting labels to stick. At the same time, demeriting labels often stick to marginalised people far too easily. Similarly, labels like “slut”, “snowflake”, and “DEI hire” misrepresent something as problematic, but for certain audiences, they have considerable sticking power. This allows demeriting labels to function as the strong arm of prejudiced ideologies, which is I argue that why they demand our attention.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
What, if anything, can we come to know about other people through virtual embodiment? Critics of virtual reality (VR) which virtually embodies users as marginalised persons argue such experiences inevitably misrepresent marginalised lives, encourage epistemic overconfidence in users, and reduce complex social identities to decontextualised simulations. While these concerns are valid, I argue that they do not exhaust the epistemic possibilities of VR. Drawing on empirical studies and philosophical analysis, I present a positive account of what we can come to know about others through VR-mediated perspective-taking.
Focusing on a subclass of prosocial behaviour-promoting virtual reality, I argue that certain VR experiences can confer propositional, practical, and what I call grounded inferential knowledge of marginalised experiences. Grounded inferential knowledge refers to a user's ability to learn about their own affective and bodily responses to virtual harms, and to correctly infer—on that basis—how those same harms might feel to others in real life. While VR cannot give us direct access to others’ experiences, it can function as a scaffold for more accurate, situated, and reflective understanding of shared human vulnerabilities. By reframing the epistemic stakes of virtual embodiment, this account offers a more nuanced framework for evaluating the promise and limits of VR as an ethical and educational tool.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
The Centre for Critical Thinking and Ethics, Newington College has spearheaded a K-12 strategic approach to sharpening student’s critical thinking skills. Drawing from the Philosophy in Schools / P4C / and Teaching for Thinking pedagogical approaches, our initiative is spelled out in some detail in Jensen et al (2024). Due to (i) the detached nature of our sharable resources (ii) our growing suite of interschool events, and (iii) our professional learning programs, benefits of this initiative are felt both inside and outside the classrooms of Newington College, across Australia and indeed around the globe. This presentation will showcase aspects of our work, with particular focus on the classroom resources we have created to support student thinking, extending initial findings presented in Jensen & Giles (2023). As we are focused on the scalability and adjustability of our approach, we invite collaboration with other educators and researchers to work together toward refining practices in this critical area.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper seeks to develop an account of what it means to think ethically and to therefore be able to criticise certain forms of life, practices, and institutional arrangements by taking the particular case of the promissory relations undergirding modern social and economic relations as a privileged case. By drawing on the Humean problematic of the “is-ought” and Anscombe’s denunciation of “modern moral philosophy” with respect to the question of generating ethical obligations for promissory relations, I offer a Hegelian-Aristotelian account of “ethical life” which demonstrates the necessity of incorporating any account of promissory relations within a more holistic conception of oneself, the world, and others. In so doing, I draw upon a series of thinkers in the Hegelian tradition in dialogue with Hume and Anscombe in order to draw out the intersubjectively constituted normative structure of certain social forms which may appear natural or non-normative and which take the contract or promise as their form, such as the debt or wage-labour contract, in order to situate them within a broader conception of ethical life, and, where this ethical life is threatened, to be able to criticise and overcome them.
In particular, I seek to show how our relations to others in modern global capitalism cannot be reduced to “simple promises” but rather represent a unique form of domination which reorients orthodox ethical interpretations. Through Rödl’s account of self-comprehension, the limits of the promissory model are demonstrated through the universal, reflective moment contained in thinking self-comprehensively whilst participating in these relations. I then turn to Taylor’s understanding of positive freedom as the basis of any ethical critique, by which we can recognise affronts to freedom insofar as they prevent us from realising certain value-laden ends. Drawing on McDowell, Pippin, and Stern, I show how an Aristotelian ethical naturalism situates the Kantian demand for self-legislation within Hegel’s account of freedom and ethical life which relies upon a form of collective self-understanding grounded in what it means to live a free life within which any analysis of such promissory or contractual relations must be situated.
Reason-Responsiveness Theories of Moral Responsibility (RRT) posits that the control necessary for moral responsibility depends on an agent's sensitivity to reasons. However, Situationist experiments present evidence that situational factors, rather than reasons, predominantly shape behavior. This paper contends that RRT cannot adequately address these challenges. After critiquing two common yet failed defenses—namely, the rarity of situational influences and the view that situational factors qualify as reasons—I discuss about RRT's usage of the Aristotelian Ethical Method (AEM), which suffers from selective application and epistemic overconfidence in attributing reason-responsiveness. Moreover, even when reason-responsiveness is capable to be captured by non-ideal cognizer, it remains irrelevant to the causal explanation of actions in situationist scenarios as a modal property. Finally, RRT falls short of meeting the Authority Demand, as it provides no authoritatively normative reason by its failure to justify a moral fact of the grounding relation between reason-responsiveness and moral responsibility.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The Krohn-Rhodes theorem, the cornerstone of algebraic automata theory, has fallen into relative obscurity. That's not a huge surprise: most presentations of the theorem are mathematically forbidding, the payoff is not obvious, and relatively few philosophers (or mathematicians, for that matter) care about semigroup theory. However, several recent articles have suggested that the Krohn-Rhodes is useful for understanding hierarchically organised complex systems, gene regulatory networks, and Large Language Models, all things that philosophers do care about. I will present an accessible introduction to the Krohn-Rhodes theorem, focusing on its use in the cascaded decomposition of finite-state automata. I also gesture at a simple proof. Time permitting, I will then outline Eilenberg’s holonomy decomposition---the most common procedure for generating cascaded decompositions---and connect this back to the theorem's use in understanding complex systems.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Recently, a group of philosophers, often dubbed 'impossible-worldists' have embraced impossible-worldism—a view that accepts impossible worlds into their ontological category. According to impossible-worldists, by accepting impossible worlds, many hyperintensional phenomena which possible world frameworks cannot address can be accounted for. For example, it is claimed that impossible worlds can account for the hyperintensional phenomena of propositions, doxastic states, counterpossibles, and truth in impossible fiction. However, this paper presents an argument against impossible-worldism. I will argue that there is a dilemma for impossible-worldism; impossible-worldists will either beg the question on determining which kinds of impossible worlds they accept or will neglect specific cases of problems they claim to account for. Specifically, the impossible world framework inherits the same problem from the possible world framework when it deals with impossible objects which are not constituted by possible objects, when these impossible objects are referred to by proper names.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-206
One of the great mysteries that characterizes our time is the hard problem of consciousness. How is it that physical things like brains give rise to subjective experience? The problem continues to remain stubbornly unresolved despite decades of intense research, and this has motivated some of us to turn a critical eye back on the assumptions embedded within the question itself. One worry is that framing the hard problem using the “gives rise” locution implicitly assumes dualism by smuggling in a separation between the brain and consciousness, putting physicalism at a dialectical disadvantage as a result. I offer a more sustained analysis of this longstanding dispute than has hitherto been provided and conclude that physicalists should indeed abandon the gives rise framing of the problem of consciousness. However, another (and more substantial) worry is that the longer the hard problem remains intractable, the more reason we have for thinking its most foundational assumption is faulty. Namely, the denial that consciousness is fundamental.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Some ‘responsibility-sensitive' theorists of justice have argued that because parents are responsible for the existence of children, only they are responsible for the costs of those children. Others have argued that because children are akin to public goods, the costs of children should be socialised between parents and non-parents. I argue that both analyses are incomplete. To focus only on costs neglects that I should receive the benefits that flow from my choices. The relevant benefit of having children is demographic renewal, ergo parents should receive the benefits of demographic renewal to the exclusion of non-parents. However, because demographic renewal is embedded in children, it presents itself as a non-excludable public good, motivating the argument for cost socialisation. But this is not a necessary conclusion. I argue that a case for directing to parents the hypothetical market price of demographic renewal can be made by reference to Ronald Dworkin's theory of distributive justice, Equality of Resources. In my talk, I explain how Dworkin's principle of abstraction grounds fertility rate targeting as a price discovery mechanism, why a state might choose various forms of parental compensation, and why cost socialisation is appropriate only between parents.
Generative AI language models are increasingly being positioned as epistemic tools, used to aid enquiry and generally help us find things out. However, they suffer from certain flaws which both limit their usefulness as epistemic tools and risk causing epistemic harm. While AI bias and hallucinations have been written about as being epistemically harmful, an underexplored trait is that of sycophancy. Sycophantic AI models produce outputs which match user beliefs over truthful ones. This draws parallels with other forms of algorithmic feed-back loops and epistemic bubbles which can limit the user's ability to see beyond their own perspective and to acquire knowledge. The trait of sycophancy in AI has been attributed to stages in the training process where models learn from human feedback to reflect user preferences. This work further sketches a possible application of vice epistemology to language models. It does so, not by giving agency to these models, but by looking at whether aggregating human preferences in the training process can manifest a kind of collective epistemic vice. I will ask whether epistemically harmful character traits, arising from collective training process, can meaningfully qualify as (non-agential) epistemic vices of AI.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-262
Philosophers have long shaped foundational thinking, public discourse, and education. But the past three decades have seen seismic shifts in how we teach and learn—through digital platforms, short-form content, and increasingly personalized experiences. Now, AI presents both a profound challenge and a powerful opportunity. Tools like large language models simulate reasoning but lack true critical thought, risking cognitive offloading and diminishing the reflective practices central to philosophy.
Meanwhile, a cultural hunger for meaning is being met not by rigorous inquiry, but by ideologues and influencers offering simplistic answers in viral formats. The problem isn’t just that figures like Andrew Tate or Jordan Petersen exist—it’s that there isn’t enough compelling, accessible alternatives.
I argue that philosophers must reimagine their role—not abandoning depth, but adapting communication for new mediums. Through public engagement, curricular reform, and fostering dialogue beyond algorithmic echo chambers, we can reclaim space for critical thinking in an age of noise.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In an age dominated by algorithms, disinformation, and increasing political polarisation, the role of the classroom in fostering democratic habits of thought is more critical than ever. Drawing on Connell’s work and a critical feminist lens, this presentation argues that without a conscious effort to challenge patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalist structures, schools risk reproducing them.
Social justice research in education reinforces the valuable role of teachers using dialogic pedagogical approaches as a transformative approach in schools. This session aims to explore how embedding dialogic pedagogies enables students to interrogate fake news, question inherited assumptions and engage meaningfully in respectful disagreement. Grounded in a commitment to democracy, classrooms should become spaces where students learn not what to think, but how to think. Practical classroom examples will illustrate how these concepts are enacted with students, offering a provocation for educators to reflect on how their pedagogy shapes the world. By using classroom dialogue as a tool for empowerment, teachers create a culture to help students question injustice, challenge dominant narratives, and actively participate in building a fairer and more inclusive world.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper develops a conceptualisation of analogy in the history of philosophical methodology as a pharmakon – a force that is both destructive and creative (Derrida, 2004, pp. 75-76). In so doing, it examines an exemplar of analogical methodology by interrogating the potentiality of the radical imagination in the analogical thinking of Immanuel Kant. By focussing on Kant, I am attempting to broaden the understanding of a particular tradition within philosophical methodology he revolutionised, particular in the Critique of the Theory of Judgment (1790), where analogical thinking becomes the basis of the radical collapse of otherwise distinct domains, such as beauty and morality, human and non-human animal. The claims I will make about the revolutionary force of Kant’s theory of analogy, underpinned by the function of the imagination, may appear to verge on the heterodox. While it is true that Kant appeared to adhere to a closed architectonic or grand system (A832/B860), abandoning the uncertainty of the tensional void represented by the force of the imagination which underpins analogical thinking, I will suggest that Kant also represents a destabilising force that, as Jane Kneller has traced, had a significant influence on the re-intrication of poetry and philosophy in the work of the German Romantic tradition.
Daoist political discourse offers a tantalising vision of leaders who are somehow effective without being oppressive. But is there any way for it to work in practice? Inspired by the lesser-known outer and miscellaneous chapters of the Zhuangzi, I argue that a strand of Daoist political thought prefigured some aspects of what we now call the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, including the non-obvious insights that crowds can be collectively wise, that diversity is valuable, and that too much reliance on expertise or authority can be problematic. This prefiguration is not merely a matter of historical curiosity: the Zhuangzi’s discussions of leadership offer helpful and relevant observations about how to be an effective aggregator of the crowd’s wisdom in situations where quantitative methods are not an option. Zhuangzian political methods are also potentially more compatible with Western liberal democracy than Confucian ones. Finally, a “wisdom of crowds” understanding of Zhuangzian political advice also makes sense of several difficult puzzles in Zhuangzi interpretation, such as the apparent arbitrariness of Ziporyn’s wild-card perspectivalism and the text’s seemingly contradictory lessons regarding the uses of the useless.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Agricultural robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly promoted for their environmental virtues. In Australia, the idea that agriculture needs to be less environmentally destructive and attend to ongoing colonial harms, is increasingly expressed in terms of ‘caring for Country’. Although this concept draws on Indigenous ideas of kinship, it is being adopted by white agriculturalists seeking to be more environmentally attentive and sensitive to Indigenous justice issues. In this paper, we ask whether, and if so how, robots and AI can contribute to caring for Country. We examine issues that those who seek to be more sensitive to relationships with the environment and Indigenous justice must consider in the context of decisions about AI and robots. We argue that while not without promise in some respects, robots and AI seem likely to exacerbate the logics of settler-colonial agriculture in ways that call into question their capacity to contribute to an ethic of caring for Country.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Spatial reasoning is already used in logic, from intuitive visual aids like Venn diagrams, to formal structures such as networks, lattices, and trees.
SAM Space proposes a new system: an analytic geometry for logic. Just as Cartesian coordinates allow algebraic equations to be rendered as points, planes, functions and vectors, SAM Space seeks to do the same for logical and philosophical concepts.
The framework is grounded in three dimensions—Subject, Attribute, and Mode—analogous to axes in a coordinate system. A central concept is the Logos Line, akin to the number line in mathematics, representing the totality of what can be said or known.
The long-term goal is to enable precise mathematical modelling of philosophical concepts and systems.
This presentation outlines the foundational ideas of SAM Space. The work is exploratory rather than technical. It does not assume knowledge of advanced logic, formal proofs, or heavy notation. A working grasp of high school mathematics and introductory logic (e.g., truth tables and predicate logic) will suffice.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper articulates some points of contact between Ernst Cassirer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by analysing the influence of Cassirer’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. There are two concepts developed in Cassirer’s late philosophy of culture, that are of particular importance for understanding its influence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought – ‘symbolic form’ and ‘symbolic pregnance’. Symbolic forms may be broadly understood as contexts of meaning within which certain cultural formations take shape. Symbolic pregnance refers to the containment of a symbolic form within any given cultural formation – the two concepts of symbolic form and symbolic pregnance are thus intimately related. Seeing how these concepts play out in the unique context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought allows us to gain some level of clarity on the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to the Neo-Kantian approach championed by Ernst Cassirer, and thus to Kantianism more generally.
I begin by asking what naturalising the philosophy of time should look like. I develop an account of it, drawing on work by Steven French and Alvin Goldman, whereby the philosophy of time needs to be continuous with scientific findings about the nature of time and about the human cognitive apparatus. I develop an argument against relying on intuitions in the philosophy of time, as these can be better explained by appealing to psychology and cognitive science than by taking them to be veridical. Finally, I introduce the predictive processing framework, according to which the content of our perceptual experiences is a function of both how the world is independently of us, and of a contribution made by the perceiver herself. I use this framework to argue that temporal intuitions about passage and presentness are better explained as the result of features of our internal model of the world, generated by the predictive processing framework, rather than features of the world itself.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-206
Prima facie, perception makes us directly aware of particular objects and property-instances, and enables us to make knowledgeable de re reference to them. Call this the strong referential character of experience. Explaining strong referential character of experience is a desideratum for all theories of perception, and some naive realists argue that they give the best explanation of the strong referential character of experience: we refer to particular objects and property-instances because they constitute our experience. Against naive realists, I defend a a dual-component theory, which states that to perceive x as F is to be aware of sensory qualities and to have a belief that x is F. I motivate two more implications. First, the strong referential character that naive realists posit is not a completely true datum: we do make knowledgeable de re references, but it's not in virtue of being directly aware of particular objects and property-instances. Second, our intuitions about how perception influences further cognition and action seem to be better honoured by positing perceptual beliefs or belief-like states, and as such, dual-component views deserve more attention.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that there is only one innate right: the right to be free from determination by another’s will. There and in his late political essays, Kant argues that the fact that human beings reside on the watery spherical surface of the earth (globus terraqueus) provides a rare instance of material fact conditioning right. As Jakob Huber has recently argued, innate right to be free of arbitrary determination combines with the material fact of the limited and interconnected nature of the planet’s surface to produce what Huber calls “a right to be somewhere” (Huber, Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism). In this essay I follow Huber’s focus on the physical conditions constraining the exercise of Kantian right, but I focus on the circumstances of the Anthropocene as even more demanding than the globus terraqueus. Humanity under Anthropocene conditions constrains the freedom of future generations to make choices about their own interactions, in much the same way that the would-be intergenerationally tyrannical church synod criticised by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” sought to constrain the freedom of future generations to inquire into the truth of their religious commitments. I argue that humanity’s new circumstances make Kant’s account of provisional right much more widely relevant than has previously been recognised, because the intergenerational equivalent of the civil condition is unavailable.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Can virtual reality help us to “walk in the shoes” of other people? Optimists claim that VR is the “ultimate empathy machine”, a way for those who have never been to war, or lived in solitary confinement, to know what it is like to have these experiences from the comfort of their living room. Pessimists hold that it is absurd and dangerous to think that VR could be a way of acquiring this kind of ‘what it is like’ knowledge. In this paper I develop a position which can accommodate the important insights of the pessimist’s critique, whilst also allowing us to agree with (a qualified version of) the optimist’s claim that VR can help us to acquire ‘what it is like’ knowledge. This position is based on recent work I have done showing how ‘what it is like’ knowledge comes in different grades and degrees.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-262
Park Ridge State High School has embarked on a journey to become a centre of excellence in the teaching and learning of critical thinking. Teaming up with the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, a project that blends insights from Philosophy and Education to provide a unique, pedagogical approach to teaching critical thinking in the classroom.
Park Ridge SHS teachers are rethinking what classroom practice looks like. First and foremost, this involves a shift in focus in the classroom from knowledge transmission to students’ cognitive and metacognitive development. Secondly, it involves students owning and driving the inquiry process. Thirdly, it involves students and teachers sharing a common metalanguage around thinking and argumentation that helps students understand the cognitive tasks teachers are asking them to perform.
This kind of pedagogical transformation takes time and space for teaching staff and has required investing in extensive professional learning and mentoring. Creating a thinking school requires a cultural shift within the school so that it can remain focused on the important work—teaching and learning. Teachers are actively co-designing research projects that focus on what teaching for thinking looks like in the classroom, results from this research feed back into the teacher’s pedagogical development through a sequence of action research cycles.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Why wouldn’t you eat a person? One simple answer for many of us is that cannibalism is morally wrong. Another, perhaps more honest answer, is that it would be gross. In this paper, I show how this disgust response can be rationally related to moral judgements and evaluation. Although disgust and moral judgement are clearly correlated, most modern handlings of disgust treat the truth (or some nearby sense of accuracy/applicability) or falsity of ‘it’s disgusting’ (at least in the sense that applies to food) as being conceptually and essentially unrelated to the truth of any moral evaluation. Any moral judgement that springs from our disgust, then, is simply mistaking a non-moral response for something more meaningful. This paper gives an alternative account. By looking at what aspects of food ‘that’s disgusting’ evaluates, I argue that evaluations of tastes and textures can involve moral – and morally relevant – evaluations.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There are multiple vectors along which one can be more or less pessimistic about the prospects for human-AI friendship. I could be optimistic about the purely technological aspects of AI friends, believing that they will soon be able to do some non-trivial percentage of the things the AI companies claim they can already do. I could be optimistic about the affordances of these AI friends for human relationships and experiences. I could be optimistic about the implementation, or the regulation, of such AI. Here, I examine and taxonomize these possibilities.
I was born and raised in Northland, New Zealand, outside of Whangārei. My undergraduate education at the University of Otago resulted in an LLB and a BA(Hons) in Political Science and Philosophy. I then moved to Melbourne, Australia, where I completed... Read More →
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-206
Some norms of reasoning tell us certain inferences are forbidden – for example, Bumbling Bruce goes wrong in reasoning to the conclusion that 𝑝 when his sole reasons are that he accepts 𝑝 → 𝑞 and 𝑞. Some tell us that certain inferences are mandatory – for example, Stunned Sharon goes wrong when she remains in suspension about 𝑞 when she is fully aware that 𝑝 and 𝑝 → 𝑞 are and remain among her reasons, and there are no cognitive or pragmatic reasons that 𝑞 might not be credible for her. (There are parallel norms that tell us that certain (non-)inferences are permissible.)
Logical Pluralism (at least the Canberra subspecies) is the view that many relations between sets of sentences and sentences satisfy the core platitudes governing ‘logical consequence’. These platitudes are generally taken to include formality, topic-neutrality, necessary truth-preservingness, and the capacity to play a role in norms of right reasoning. Logic itself is not normative, but it plays a role in regulating the inference of those who recognise its presence – providing reasons to infer. The norms might tell us that it is (intuitionistically) impermissible to reason to 𝑝 from ¬¬𝑝, when the truth of the latter is one's only reason for accepting 𝑝, and that it is classically mandatory to to reason to 𝑝 from ¬¬𝑝, when one has the cognitive capacity to consider and accept 𝑝 and one has no reason against accepting it. Given that one needs to regulate one's doxastic behaviour, some way of aggregating these norms seems both mandatory and impossible.
In this talk, I will elaborate on this and related puzzles, and work through some (pluralist and non-pluralist) options in response.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
After years of reading philosophy, one is likely to pick up on several of the same or similar ‘moves’ made in distinct domains. Familiarity with the tropes of philosophy brings about an awareness of notable dialectical structures of which one can ‘copy-paste’ the form sans content. Move-literacy can uncover novel approaches to ongoing philosophical debates. A novel response to a problem in epistemology may inspire a similar response in moral philosophy; a clever distinction made in metaphysics may help one make a similar move in aesthetics; the way claims are organized in a literature review from the philosophy of science may be usefully imported into a discussion in the philosophy of religion. In this talk, I want to further contribute to identifying moves and add to the repository of them. But I also aim - in the spirit of Alan Hájek - to promote active and ongoing engagement with one’s inventory of moves as a worthwhile heuristic. Maintaining move-mindedness facilitates an engagement with moves that goes beyond our familiarity with moves as they are commonly individuated. Some parts of moves make for useful ‘mini moves’ – often discovered when mere components or aspects of a full move prove apt or inspirational (or conversely, deserving of critique). Additionally, some approximations of moves may be more (or less) suitable than their canonical neighbor moves in some contexts. Lastly, I will discuss some pitfalls of being overly rigid when making use of move-minded methods.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
We have two aims in this paper: (1) to taxonimise the literature on machine speech, (2) to evaluate whether the question of machine speech is worth asking.
Firstly, we suggest that responses fall into two camps: superficialists and deepists.
Superficialists think that we can discern whether a machine speaks by considering its outward properties. Any system rightly viewed under the intentional stance (Dennett 1989), or 'meets all the a priori constraints' on the concept of speaking (Chalmers 2023) thereby counts as speaking.
Conversely, deepists think we should look “under the hood” to details like algorithms and computational processes. Deepists may think that speaking requires intentionality, which requires 'internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains' (Seale 1980), or that current LLM-based systems are mere stochastic parrots (Bender and Koller 2020).
We then argue that the question of machine speech is not worth asking. Our guide is Turing, who thinks that the question of machine intelligence is "too meaningless to deserve discussion" (1950:442). We concur: despite progress in our understanding of meaning and communication, these key notions are still too undetermined. What we should ask, instead, is how to go on using ‘speaks’.
This paper argues that the strongest form of causal necessity, which David Hume advanced as unjustified, does in fact exist. It is found, paradoxically, in the relation between causal omissions and their effects. I also propose a reformulation of the ‘c causes e iff…’ analysis into a new analysis that best accounts for causal necessity. In brief, when any causal factor, intrinsic to a causal system, is omitted, a change necessarily occurs.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In recent years, global demonstrations and social movements such as Black Lives Matter have mobilized diverse people to contest systemic discrimination, inequality, and genocide. Judith Butler has analyzed these modes of resistance and posits that performative resistance takes effect in assemblies formed when multiple individuals convene in public spaces, such as squares and streets. In other words, when individuals from diverse backgrounds come together, there are performative oppositions to the status quo of discrimination and inequality. This paper will analyse the performative effects of the assembly Butler discusses, focusing on the ‘right to appear’. The ‘right to appear’, variously described by Butler, may be seen as the right to appear in the public/political space and in relation to others. Butler's concept of the right to appear can be understood as combining two perspectives. First, it draws upon Arendt's analysis of the public sphere. Second, it is informed by Arendt's concept of 'the right to have rights'. Butler speaks of a mixture of these two perspectives, referring to Arendt but partly disagreeing with her. This paper aims to highlight the features of the right to appear by comparing Arendt's argument with Butler's analysis.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I introduce an analytical framework for the fine-grained study of generative AI bias, applying the notion of social marking. When we say that a feature is socially marked, we mean that it stands out as unusual or noteworthy within a given social context, and that it prompts special treatment, for good or ill. I propose that much of the homogeneity of generative AI outputs results from the AI systems codifying that certain demographics and their features are marked, and in response to marked features AI systems will change the demographics it portrays, sometimes radically so. As a result, these systems will over-represent non-marked, dominant groups in the absence of certain features, and over-represent marked, non-dominant groups in the presence of such features. There are positive and negative forms of bias that result. The positive bias, where AI systems have stereotypical outputs, has attracted the most attention. But the negative bias is also noteworthy: some demographics are typically left out of depictions unless there is some marked feature in play, meaning that these systems selectively omit non-dominant groups in contexts where they should be visible.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-262
This paper explores the voices and lived experiences of young boys aged between 12-13 who participated in the University of Qld’s Philosothon for the first time. The Philosothon was a structured philosophical inquiry that engaged students from several local and urban Qld high schools in collaborative dialogue around critical thinking. This small study centres on the boys’ perspectives so that we can better understand how young people experience philosophical thinking in a formal, dialogic setting. Through video vignettes and live presentations, students will afford their own reflections and moments of challenge, initial skepticism and shifts in thinking during and after the event. Their voices reveal emerging confidence in reasoning, collaboration and intellectual curiosity. Rather than focusing on the outcome of the competition, this paper explores the process of philosophical engagement as experienced by the boys themselves. Their experiences provide compelling insights into their intersections with inquiry and perspectives of collaboration in a setting outside of their schooling milieu. This paper contributes to a broader discussion on how philosophical events can create spaces of belonging, collaboration and meaning making, particularly for those new to the discipline. The project affirms the value of listening to young people and honouring their voices when participating in philosophical inquiry.
Monday July 6, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Philosophy in the Diaspora: The role of philosophy in helping to navigate the complexities of modern life An illuminating public panel event as part of the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, where we explore the enduring relevance of philosophy in contemporary contexts. Philosophy in the Diaspora examines how philosophical methods and knowledge shapes and responses to urgent questions in areas as diverse as medicine, police leadership, education, and social justice.
This discussion brings together thinkers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds to unpack philosophy’s role in navigating ethical challenges, policy decisions, and societal transformations. The conversation extends beyond academic inquiry—public participation is encouraged through an interactive Q&A session, fostering a vibrant exchange of ideas.
Join us as we explore how philosophy continues to move, adapt, and thrive across different landscapes. Your voice in the discussion matters. Come ready to think, challenge, and engage!
Should university campuses be politically neutral? In this paper I focus mainly on whether professors can or should express political views in class. Its main contribution is to distinguish between absolutist arguments, often thought by proponents to apply universally to all institutions and contexts, and more nuanced context-dependent considerations. I argue that while there are lessons to be learned from each, the absolutist arguments fail. While this means that things are, and there may not be a one size fit all ideal prescription (Schliesser, 2024), the paper describes a plethora of considerations that should be considered when devising policies. The paper examines three absolutist arguments, one against neutrality and two in favor. The first is that neutrality is impossible, it is a myth that serves those in power, and therefore professors should not be neutral (Dea, n.d.; Giroux, 2020, p. 210) . The second is that when professors use their social status and role in classrooms to express their political opinions, it is an abuse of power. The third is that professors, when talking as professors, should talk only about their areas of expertise and research (Fish, 2008). When they express their political views, they are not doing so.
Monday July 6, 2026 8:30pm - 9:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
Baruch Spinoza is profound and insightful. He conceives the world from a geometrical standpoint, and his geometric method is demonstrative in imitation of Euclidean geometry. He believes that the same principles that govern the universe also govern the nature of things. In the universe, the conclusions of geometry necessarily follow their axioms. In the same way, the ethical and physical things follow from the nature of things. To this effect, he introduces some definitions from which he deduces a systematic structure whose parts are logically connected. Thus, he developed his theory by deductive reasoning.
His entire theory can be summed up in substance, attributes and modes. These are three parts of the universe and the fundamental structures of his entire thought. Substance is the framework of all reality. Attributes are the primary expressions of the substance, either in a bodily form or a conceptual form. The modes are the particular modifications of the substance.
This paper discusses the five interconnecting features in Spinoza's immanent ontology: substance monism, univocity of attributes, the status of modes, immanent causality and relational ethics. It argues that these interconnecting features comprehensively formulate Spinoza’s concept of substance.
Monday July 6, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
This enquiry is motivated by two interrelated aims, at the core of which are two fundamental questions that troubled Descartes: ‘is a new metaphysics possible?’ and ‘is a free, autonomous enquirer possible?’. The search for a new metaphysics is not independent of but requires the attainability of freedom, transforming the self as locus of authority and autonomy. The attainability of both is predicated on Descartes’ constructive conception of scepticism, which is completely different from what is considered as ‘Cartesian scepticism’.
My first aim is to shed light on the ways in which Descartes’ response to scepticism has metaphysical and moral implications, and on his order of reasoning, which is indispensable to his metaphysical turn and ontological shift away from Scholasticism.
The second is to explore the connection between scepticism, habits, and freedom, as against misattributions to Descartes’ undertaking. Doubt requires reason and freedom. Without freedom from prejudicial intellectual habits and prevailing Principles, Descartes’ enquiry would not get off the ground. This triad of notions has far-reaching consequences for our philosophical concerns, yet it has gone unnoticed in the vast literature on scepticism. A sceptical enquirer is a searcher after truth. Descartes’ concern is not primarily the external world, but truth.
Monday July 6, 2026 10:30pm - 11:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
