AAP 2026 CONFERENCE: Full Schedule

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8:30am NZST

Check-in Desk Day 3

Tuesday July 7, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am NZST

MSB Foyer

Check-in Desk open.

Tuesday July 7, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am NZST
MSB Foyer

9:00am NZST

Truth and History

Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am NZST

PWC

As authoritarians intuitively grasp, if you control what people know about the past, you better control the future. George Orwell once raised an even more radical claim: that if you control the present, you control the past itself. This talk examines this claim by sketching an account of historical truth that partially validates Orwell’s thought—and also helps us understand why the truth about history is so vital to a democratic way of life.

Chair

Joe Ulatowski

Conference Organiser, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Speakers

Michael Lynch

University of Connecticut

KEYNOTE
Michael Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Provost Professor of the Humanities at the University of Connecticut. His books have been translated into a dozen languages and include On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It, The Internet of Us: Knowing Mor... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am NZST
PWC

KEYNOTE, In Person

10:30am NZST

Morning Break

Tuesday July 7, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am NZST

MSB Foyer

Tuesday July 7, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am NZST
MSB Foyer

Breaks

11:00am NZST

CLAUDE LOAB and I (AM)

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.20

When existential and religious choices are made under uncertainty, complexity and entanglement are likely to follow (De Cruz, 2021, p. 2). This is especially true at the intersection of generative AI (GAI), philosophy, neuroscience, and theology. If, as some argue, AI has become a new kind of entity — an 'autosapiens' that is adaptive (it learns), amiable (it befriends), and arcane (it mystifies) — then the question of how we encounter and respond to it becomes urgent (Heimans & Timms, 2024). This commentary uses the concept of kairos — with its classical and theological resonances — to argue that philosophy, neuroscience, and theology not only share common ground in addressing this challenge, but that their genuine dialogue may yield important breakthroughs in understanding what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines.
At the convergence of philosophy, neuroscience, and theology, this paper argues that the rise of generative AI constitutes a self-renewing kairos that calls for urgent interdisciplinary dialogue. As AI systems such as Claude increasingly occupy neurological and meaning-making roles once associated with gods and sages, sentience—the felt, conscious awareness that Claude lacks but humans possess—emerges as the decisive hinge of the entire human–AI encounter.

Speakers

Carlos Raimundo

Adjunct Research Fellow, Charles Sturt University

Dr Carlos A. Raimundo is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture (ACC&C), part of Charles Sturt University, Australia. A physician, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and international educator, his work explores the intersection of philosophy... Read More →

Nikolai Blaskow

Adjunct Research Fellow, Charles Sturt University

Dr Nikolai Blaskow is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture (ACC&C), part of Charles Sturt University, Australia. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Religion from Bangor University, Wales, where his doctoral research examined the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.20

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

11:00am NZST

The Generation of Justification: Testimony and Memory

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

This paper explores the debate between transmissive and generative views of testimony. According to the generation view, testimony can generate knowledge even when neither the testifier nor the testimonial chain previously possessed that knowledge. While this view has been extensively developed since Lackey’s seminal work, Wright (2016) argues that the central issue in the transmissive/generative dispute concerns justification rather than knowledge, particularly propositional justification. However, a corresponding generation view of testimonial justification remains underdeveloped.
A parallel debate has emerged in the epistemology of memory. Although generative accounts of memorial knowledge were initially proposed by Lackey (2005) in a manner analogous to generative accounts of testimony, subsequent discussions have focused primarily on whether memory preserves or generates propositional justification since Senor (2007). These works have produced increasingly fine-grained accounts of the preservative/generative distinction.
I argue that these developments in the epistemology of memory can illuminate the testimonial case. Drawing on Miyazono and Tooming’s (2025) analysis of the preservative/generative distinction, I reassess existing generative accounts of testimony and develop a more precise framework for understanding when testimony transmits justification and when it generates it. This framework clarifies the structure of the transmissive/generative debate and provides resources for responding to Wright’s challenge.

Speakers

Sui Shimizu

Hokkaido University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Epistemology, In Person

11:00am NZST

The Environmental Ethics of Overpopulation

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

N3.01

Using Trevor Hedberg’s consequentialist argument for population control, I consider some historical and modern arguments against such control, and suggest responses that address those concerns. In particular, I will argue that economic concerns and anti-colonialist anxieties are misguided. Despite this and even with the best adaptive policies, the world’s environment and climate cannot survive the number of human beings currently on the planet, much less more. While acknowledging legitimate restrictions on coercion and acknowledging the problems of effectiveness, I will suggest that there is value in recognizing a problem even where we have limited solutions. Contrary to Hedberg, I will also argue that modern industrialized societies have special obligations to restrict their procreation rates.

Speakers

Catherine McDonald

Retired, Monash University

Started out interesting in Bioethics and the Ethics of War. Now I'm interested in Environmental Ethics. (I'm interested in AI only if to the degree that I can't tolerate spruikers)

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
N3.01

Ethics, In Person

11:00am NZST

Contrasting Defences of Gender Equality: Hobbes and Cavendish

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.02

Hobbes has an unwavering account of gender equality. This is so on two counts. The first count is based on a physiological account of species equality influenced by the work of Harvey. Insofar as biology is destiny, women as bearers and rearers of children have the first experience of dominion. The second count asserts that even if inequality is natural, the dictates of reason enjoin a moral valuation of each as equal. Without this, no social contract, no peace, is possible. For Hobbes, gender equality inheres in what counts as a species being and what reason dictates for society.

Cavendish takes a different view. As Nature abounds with diversity and hierarchy, so do humans. Indeed, heterogeneity is the defining principle of matter, including human matter. But this principle means that there is no arbitrary or conventional barrier based on characteristics of sex (or gender). Her own society constrains women, but her imagined other worlds are populated with empresses, women who are military strategists, and all manner of varieties of humans. Diversity, for her, implies the absence of restraint on the grounds of sex, an equal opportunity approach that will by nature result in difference (inequality).

Speakers

Diane Zetlin

University of Queensland

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, Remote

11:00am NZST

A Property Theory of Natural Laws

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.03

Under one conception of philosophy, we are to seek the truth under the guidance of logical reasoning. Nothing is more fundamental to that kind of philosophy than entailment—except perhaps a handful of core concepts like being and nonbeing, sameness and difference. Here, we explore a theory that grounds entailment in the being and nonbeing of properties. In a nutshell: we understand ‘properties’ to be ways for things to be. We assume that there exist ways for things to be. We understand one thing to ‘entail’ another when there is no way to avoid it. We take these occurrences of ‘to be,’ and ‘there exist,’ and ‘there is no way,’ and other such terms, as applied to ‘properties’ and ‘ways,’ with robust ontological seriousness. The same ontological seriousness applies to the kind of necessitation that is intrinsic to the laws of nature. Things obey the laws of nature because there is no way for those things to do anything else. To tease out what that means requires the construction of a detailed theory of properties construed as ways for things to be.

Speakers

John Bigelow

emeritus professor, Monash University

I had an academic career as a Philosopher and have now retired as an Emeritus Professor at Monash University, Clayton Campus, Victoria, Australia 3800. I have a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, England, and a PhD in English from Monash University, Australia... Read More →

Martin Leckey

Honorary fellow in HPS, University of Melbourne

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.03

Metaphysics, In Person

11:00am NZST

A Hyperinferentialist Account of Active Inference

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.05

An inferentialist semantics — one that claims that the meaning of a judgement is determined by its role in reasoning — faces the problem of how to account for the seemingly noninferential transition from the perceptual to the conceptual. Robert Brandom characterises his response to this problem as ‘strong inferentialism’, claiming that in certain contexts the meaning of a judgement can be determined noninferentially, such as when a perceptual judgement is formed in response to an observation. Brandom contrasts strong inferentialism with ‘hyperinferentialism’ which has no role for these kinds of noninferential transitions. This would entail that perceptual judgements are somehow premises and conclusions of inferences, which Brandom argues would be a more consistent though ultimately unsustainable position. However, that perceptual experiences are premises and conclusions of inferences is a central claim of the recently developed active inference framework in neuroscience. Moreover, the semiotics that Charles Sanders Peirce developed late in his life can be understood as hyperinferentialist. In this paper, I argue for a reading of Peirce that emphasises the ways in which he anticipates the insights of active inference. In turn, this reading gives a naturalistically plausible account of how an inferentialist can accommodate perceptual judgements.

Speakers

Joe Melling

PhD Candidate, Monash University

I am a PhD candidate at the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS). My research focuses on the philosophy of predictive processing and active inference theories. My current work engages with the classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce to argue for... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

11:00am NZST

Kaitiakitanga and Climate Activism

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.15

This paper examines the Māori stewardship framework of kaitiakitanga as a philosophical basis for climate activism. Based on current work carried out with Indigenous philosopher Krushil Watene, funded by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and Waipapa Taumata Rau, I explore whether kaitiakitanga generates normative obligations that extend beyond permitting climate action to requiring it.

The talk discusses how contemporary institutional frameworks in Aotearoa and beyond engage with Indigenous stewardship concepts whilst simultaneously constraining Indigenous authority in environmental governance. This tension reveals a fundamental problem: the translocation of relational obligations into administrative and consultative mechanisms often fails to protect the socioenvironmental relationships those mechanisms purport to serve.

The paper investigates three dimensions: what kaitiakitanga means as an ontological and relational framework; what forms of activism this framework demands; and how we might philosophically justify more confrontational approaches to environmental protection.

By grounding the analysis in Indigenous thought rather than Western environmental ethics, the talk demonstrates how kaitiakitanga offers resources for rethinking the relationship between activism, obligation, and environmental protection. The framework challenges assumptions embedded in dominant approaches to climate action and reveals what is at stake when Indigenous concepts are institutionalised without substantive transformation of the power relations they critique.

Speakers

Marco Grix

Waipapa Taumata Rau │ University of Auckland

Convenor - AAP Community Committee

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.15

Political Philosophy, In Person

11:00am NZST

(The?) Truth

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.21

Truth is mysterious. Some have identified it with God, some with Goodness and some with Being. Some have claimed there is no such thing and others that that claim is self-refuting. Truth borders on paradox: if there is no Truth are there truths and is that the claim that there could b none one of them? Some have claimed that if there is a World there is a totality of truths and others that there can be no such totality and no such World. This paper examines some of these issues with a weather eye to how they were raised and discussed by Augustine, Anselm, and Buridan in the medieval Latin tradition and by some of our contemporaries.

Speakers

Calvin Normore

UCLA/McGill/ University of Queensland

Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.21

Truth, In Person

12:00pm NZST

On AI Agents, Outliers, and Exceptionalism(s)

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

Much of the recent academic debate in the philosophy of AI revolves around a deceptively simple question: are AI tools only as good as their datasets? Existing discussions, however, tend to focus on improving the quality or quantity of training data, thereby underestimating a more subtle issue: how do AI agents handle outlier cases? This paper examines the ‘majoritarian drift’ – the tendency of AI agents to privilege positions with the largest training footprints, systematically marginalising underrepresented perspectives and edge cases. I approach this problem through the lens of exceptionalism, understood as a condition in which a phenomenon is sufficiently unusual to demand treatment outside standard frameworks. The paper proceeds in two parts. First, I demonstrate that majoritarian drift in ethical reasoning disproportionately favours utilitarian and aggregative approaches, while disadvantaging particularist, casuistic, and minority-tradition ethics. Second, I analyse analogous distortions in logical reasoning, focusing on how majoritarian drift impairs AI judgment in cases involving exceptions to general rules, with particular attention to legal clauses. The paper argues that exceptionalism reveals a structural limitation in how current AI architectures process normative and logical complexity.

Speakers

Alexey Zhavoronkov

Senior Lecturer, Taylor's University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

12:00pm NZST

Interspecies Population Ethics

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

N3.01

An increasing number of prominent ethicists (McMahahn, Nussbaum) and effective altruists are advocating for 'wild animal suffering interventionism’ (WASI): that humanity has a strong duty to intervene into natural ecosystems to ameliorate wild animal suffering not caused by humans. Fulfilling this project requires intergenerational governance of all animal populations on earth and the development of powerful bio and surveillance technologies. These same technologies are also being developed for the purposes of ecological conservation. I argue that WASI and ecological conservation are fundamentally at odds as WASI must aim to eventually destroy ecosystems and wild animal populations. The nascent field of 'interspecies population ethics', posits that all moral subjects must be included in counterfactual populations, irrespective of species membership. I explore the population ethics accounts of McMahan, Parfit and O'Brien. This shows that WASI does not aim for a garden of Eden full of vast happy animal populations structured like natural ecological systems, as is claimed by WASI authors and their critics, but a world of (post)humans. This marks the encroachment of WASI into ecological conservation discourse as inherently anti-ecological. Emerging conflicts between WASI and conservationists are identified in New Zealand and Australia.

Speakers

James Curtin

Monash University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
N3.01

Bioethics, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Group Evidence Without Belief: Internal Tensions in Lackey's Account

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

In discussions of social epistemology, Jennifer Lackey (2021) argues that ‘a significant percentage of a group’s operative members who believe that p’ is a necessary condition for ‘a group believes that p.’ Meanwhile, with respect to group evidence, she maintains that, in certain cases, evidence possessed by a minority of members can constitute group evidence. However, in ordinary thought, there is an intuition about evidence according to which only propositions that a subject takes to be true can serve as that subject’s evidence. This intuition is also widely endorsed in philosophical discussions of evidence by scholars such as Jessica Brown (2022). In response, this paper formulates a requirement on evidence based on this intuition and uses it to argue that Jennifer Lackey’s position in social epistemology is internally inconsistent.

Speakers

Hao-Pu Kang

National Chung Cheng University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Epistemology, In Person

12:00pm NZST

In Defense of the Suicidal: A Response to Kant

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

Immanuel Kant’s (2002) stance on suicide as an act of “debasing of humanity in one’s person” has sparked debates. There is discussion on (1) the sense in which suicide is a violation of the universalizability principle and the humanity formula and (2) Kant’s unclear and imprecise discussion on suicide. However, literature regarding the supposed inconsistency of Kant’s stance on suicide vis-à-vis his conception of morality remains underdeveloped – specifically, with reference to his Kingdom of Ends (KoE) formula. In this paper, I forward an account of Kant’s stance on suicide vis-à-vis KoE formula, underpinning the importance of Christine Korsgaard’s (1996a) idea of relations of responsible reciprocity (RR) among human beings. By focusing on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2002), as well as Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996a) and The Sources of Normativity (1996b), I investigate why and how Kant’s stance on suicide becomes an inconsistency in his very notion of morality, with reference to KoE. I argue that in problematizing Kant’s conception of morality, it is important to reexamine his notions of universalizablity, humanity, and KoE. I conclude that in discussing Kant’s stance on suicide, it is imperative to underpin KoE, a Kantian concept that recognizes RR.

Speakers

Keisha Christle Abog

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of the Philippines Los Baños

Assistant Professor, University of the Philippines Los Baños
Research Interests: Philosophy for Children, Philosophy of Childhood, Kantian Ethics, Philosophy of Education, Philosophy of Humor

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, Remote

12:00pm NZST

Illusory Empowerment within Patriarchal Social Arrangements

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

I extend Kate Manne’s account of misogyny by theorizing the rewards and forms of valorization offered to women who accept patriarchal social arrangements as a sustaining branch of patriarchal social order. Manne briefly notes that such rewards warrant critical attention, but she does not theorize their structural function. Contemporary discourse increasingly frames the pursuit of these rewards as a feminist choice or a lower‑cost form of empowerment compared to resisting patriarchal norms. I argue that this empowerment is illusory. Although such rewards may temporarily improve women’s material conditions, they reinforce economic dependence and narrow the range of opportunities meaningfully available to women. By presenting patriarchal arrangements as desirable and empowering, these reward‑based mechanisms attract women’s participation and thereby sustain the patriarchal order. I also address the concern that women may accept patriarchal arrangements out of adaptive preference or under conditions of survival. Following Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model, I stress that my argument concerns structural processes, not individual liability. This account shows that patriarchal order is upheld not only through punishment and justification but also through reward‑based mechanisms that draw women into its reproduction.

Speakers

Difei Chen

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

Feminist Philosophy, Remote

12:00pm NZST

Whose Transmisogyny is it Anyway?

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

Will trans philosophy be sufficient for trans women’s liberation? And if not, what interventions are required? To explore this, I will be critically evaluating Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood (2025) in order to argue that a generalised account of trans oppression fails to give us the tools required to understand trans women’s specific gendered experiences. Instead then, I argue we should be looking toward transmisogyny as a site for analysis. To do so, I seek to answer the following questions: how should we understand transmisogyny? How do we come to be through social kinds? And what constitutes transfeminism itself?

Speakers

Rosalind Silver

Monash University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Locative and Mereological Coincidence: Beyond the Monism/Pluralism Taxonomy

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.03

Cases of coincidence, the paradigmatic example being the statue and the lump of clay, involve purported property differences that motivate the claim that there are numerically distinct coincident objects. These cases are philosophically important insofar as they put pressure on a range of interconnected questions and intuitions about material objects and their individuation, persistence conditions, location, and mereology.

The standard taxonomy of responses to these cases is relatively coarse-grained: one either accepts numerically distinct coincident objects (pluralism) or rejects them (monism), with a handful of further disagreements among variants. I argue that this picture significantly underdescribes the landscape and that disagreement over these cases involves several dimensions.

I will focus on the distinction between different ways that coincident, or merely apparently coincident, objects might be related to one another, differentiating locative coincidence from mereological coincidence. I then offer and defend methodological conceptual pluralism: a particular view about which concept(s) of coincidence we ought to employ, given the goal of clarifying what these cases consist of. This reveals multiple layers of disagreement: metaphysical, conceptual, and higher-order conceptual. The result is a far more fine-grained set of competing views of what these cases involve. It also shows that some arguments for or against the standard coarse-grained positions, in fact, target only subsets of these more fine-grained views.

Speakers

Jordan Lee-Tory

University of Sydney

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.03

Metaphysics, In Person

12:00pm NZST

From Daimōn to Phantasma: The Archaeology of "Knowing" as a Science

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

Lucretius thought of his teaching as being "of high matters". The same can be said of Plato's, whose dialogues, as J. N. Findlay said, "point beyond themselves [and] if one does not go beyond, one cannot understand them." Beyond Plato's dialogues we find a deep epistemological fabric that weaves the intellect (the mind) into a complex architecture of knowledge. Plato's luminescent column is, as we understand it, his metaphor for that which binds the intellect with its subsequent ontological categories, first and foremost its daimōn, i.e. the human being's "divine power" according to Plato. In the column, light colligates all the mental categories and also holds the "entire celestial revolution", both bound by the doctrine of Necessity. Plato's poetic, metaphoric, analogic and allegoric writing style - his solution to language's inability to convey the ineffable - shouldn't mislead us into a reductive understanding based on mysticism, whether religious, pagan, or allegorical. What we are confronted with is the first non-fragmented attempt in the West to map out the entire ontological cognitive process, a precise description of the path of "knowing", the path of a science that leads to the "perfect end".

Speakers

Fabio Bucci

Independent Researcher

Independent Researcher (AU / FR) in Philosophy and History with a background in Fine Arts and Architecture.

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, Remote

12:00pm NZST

Garment Upon Garment: Language and Truth in the Encyclopédie

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

In Language Animal and Cosmic Connections, Charles Taylor advances a theory of constitutive-expressive language. Taylor argues that this model developed in the 1790s, following Johann Herder’s theorisation of Besonnenheit ("reflective-awareness") in his Ursprung der Sprache ("Origin of Language") (1772) essay. Despite Herder’s dominant influence, Taylor names his theory after three contributors, labelling it the ‘HHH’ (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) language model. Building on analysis of J.G. Hamann’s early essay, Socratic Memorabilia (1759), this article argues that the constitutive-expressive approach to language, attributed by Taylor to a post-Enlightenment language turn, was already operative, if unacknowledged, within Enlightenment philosophy itself. Taylor does not recognise that Hamann’s mimetic technique—labelled here ‘philosophical portraiture’—catches the period’s leading philosophers relying on constitutive-expressive language in the founding documents of the French Encyclopédie project, against their professed ideal of a transparent language that unveils “Truth.” Two implications follow from this correction: (I) the transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism should be reevaluated, and (II) the longstanding debate about poetry as untruth and philosophy as truth should be revisited in light of philosophy’s unacknowledged ‘poetic’ practice.

Speakers

Sean Coker

Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Truth, Remote

1:00pm NZST

Lunch

Tuesday July 7, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm NZST

Breaks

2:00pm NZST

Temporal Human Creativity and the Limits of AI Art

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

This paper examines the role of fine arts in shaping temporal consciousness within a technology-mediated environment, particularly amid the rise of AI-generated art. Insights from Watsuji Tetsurô and Imamichi Tomonobu have already presented a reaction to the significance of temporality and aesthetic experience in their discussions on technology and the ethics of post-structural alterity. However, there remains a potential discussion in systematically articulating how artistic expression uniquely cultivates the virtue of temporal attentiveness in contrast to the technological production of AI art. This paper engages that discussion by analyzing the fine arts as bearers of temporal awareness in the contemporary context of AI art. From such discussion, there is a close examination of the concepts of artistic creation, expression, and ephemerality—further arguing that aesthetic experience enables an awareness of the transient, thereby restoring a sense of temporality diminished by technological abstraction. Such findings suggest that, unlike AI-generated art, human artistic activity embodies a lived temporal process essential to one’s aesthetic formation. The study brings further insight that preserving the expressive and temporal dimensions of art is crucial for sustaining an orientation wherein a critical framework is offered for evaluating the limitations and implications of AI art in contemporary society.

Speakers

Kevin Xavier Roque

Ateneo de Manila University

Kevin Xavier Roque is an instructor at Ateneo de Manila University. His research interests include philosophical aesthetics, historical and contemporary East Asian philosophy, systematic ethics, and philosophy of religion. He has a particular engagement with the Kyoto School of Philosophy... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Artificial Inteligence, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Pleasure, Pain, and Hedonism: Some Current Issues

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

N3.01

This paper outlines and assesses current arguments for and against the ethical hedonist claim that pleasure is the only good, and that pain is the only bad. It outlines and appraises some recent moves in ‘heterogeneity’ arguments against hedonism, and some moves in recent arguments for hedonism that appeal to an experience requirement or a resonance requirement. It also analyses contest between attitudinal and phenomenal accounts of pleasure and pain, and some differences among such accounts that matter in experience/resonance arguments for hedonism, and in heterogeneity arguments against hedonism.

Speakers

Andrew Moore

Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
N3.01

Ethics, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Procreative Asymmetry, Non-Identity, and Consistency

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

According to procreative asymmetry, there is a reason not to create a miserable life not worth living, whereas there is no reason to create a life worth living for its own sake. Although this idea is plausible, it is difficult to account for within a standard consequentialist framework based on population axiology. This paper proposes a new formal framework that extends consequentialism and argues that this intuition can be given a welfarist explanation in terms of dynamic consistency. More specifically, the framework evaluates actions not only in terms of the outcomes they bring about, but also in terms of the outcomes before those actions are performed. As a result, it becomes possible to distinguish between improving the well-being of existing individuals and creating new happy individuals. Within this framework, the axiom of dynamic consistency yields a result corresponding to the asymmetry. Creating a miserable life not worth living is impermissible because it is inconsistent with the ex post perspective, whereas refraining from creating a life worth living is permissible. Moreover, from the same mechanism of consistency, the intuitive judgments in the non-identity problem can also be explained in a unified way.

Speakers

Takayuki Nakamura

Kyoto University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

2:00pm NZST

From Inner Light to Feminist Praxis: Catherine West

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

This paper argues that the Quaker concept of the Inner Light provides a neglected but powerful feminist account of moral authority—one that challenges both hierarchical epistemologies and the privatization of ethical life. Drawing on the political praxis of Catherine West, the paper reconceptualizes the Inner Light as a feminist moral epistemology grounded in relational responsiveness rather than abstract rationality or institutional legitimacy.
Against dominant feminist frameworks that locate moral authority primarily in social position, discursive recognition, or collective standpoint, this paper shows how Quaker ethics articulate an alternative model: moral authority emerges through embodied attentiveness to injustice and the obligation to translate inward discernment into public action. Through a three-stage analysis, the paper traces how the Inner Light functions as (1) a non-hierarchical epistemic source, (2) an ethical grounding for equality and conscientious dissent, and (3) a catalyst for feminist political praxis oriented toward care, testimony, and community accountability.
By situating West’s work within this ethical tradition, the paper contends that Quaker-inspired feminist praxis disrupts the private-public divide and reframes political agency as an extension of moral attentiveness, offering a distinctive contribution to feminist debates on epistemic authority, care ethics, and post-secular political philosophy.

Speakers

Hyung Jin An

University of Delhi

Hyung Jin An achieved BA Buddhist Studies degree from Dongguk University (2020), MA Philosophy degree from Hindu College, Delhi University (2022). Now currently researching East Asian Pure Land Buddhism and Hindu Bhakti philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Delhi University... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, Remote

2:00pm NZST

Do Not Pull Apart Explanation from Grounding!

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.03

Metaphysical foundationalists hold that grounding has an explanatory role and that this role can be fulfilled only if there are fundamental entities. Accordingly, anti-foundationalist views face a charge of explanatory failure: without a fundamental level, certain explanatory demands go unmet. Recently, Cameron (2022) has challenged the assumption that grounding is inherently explanatory. If this argument succeeds, it provides the anti-foundationalist a way to resist the foundationalist’s charge by severing the connection between grounding and explanation.

In this talk, I defend foundationalism against this strategy in two ways. First, I show that Cameron’s objections stem from a conflation of distinct explanatory claims and, at times, from misidentification of the direction of the grounding relation. Once we correct these issues, the link between grounding and explanation is successfully preserved. Second, I show that detaching explanation from grounding carries significant theoretical costs: it weakens grounding’s ability to play its central structuring role in metaphysics and blurs its identity, rendering it indistinguishable from other dependence relations. Finally, I argue that separating grounding from explanation undermines our understanding of the nature of grounding itself and exposes it to skeptical concerns about its intelligibility.

Speakers

Tarun Thapar

University of Illinois

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.03

Metaphysics, In Person

2:00pm NZST

What Determines the Content of Our Imaginings?

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

When we try to imagine something and we form a mental image, there is indeed something that we imagine. But what settles the issue of what we are imagining? One possibility is that we imagine whatever we were trying to imagine by forming our mental image. This view respects the intuition that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. But it is in tension with the possibility of misidentification errors in the imagination: Sometimes, we try to imagine some object, and we end up forming a mental image of a different object because we have a false belief about what the intended object of our imagination looks like. This possibility has prompted some to claim that, sometimes, the causal origin of the mental images that we form while trying to imagine something is what determines the contents of our imaginings. This view accommodates misidentification errors, but it does so at the cost of giving up the idea that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. I offer a view about the source of the contents of our imaginings that accommodates misidentification errors while preserving privileged access to the contents of our imaginings.

Speakers

Jordi Fernández

Adelaide University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Structural Injustice and Duties of Superintendence

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

This paper develops a revised account of political responsibility for structural injustice. Building on and revising Iris Marion Young’s influential theory of “political responsibility,” it argues that responsibilities regarding structural injustice are best understood as duties of superintendence: duties to monitor, evaluate, and manage the functioning of social systems in light of the demands of justice. The paper contends that this framework better explains the distinctive moral character of political responsibility than Young’s contrast between “forward-looking” political responsibility and “backward-looking” liability. Duties of superintendence are presented as second-order responsibilities borne by citizens and institutions alike, especially states and other powerful actors charged with regulating social life. On this account, failures of political responsibility can ground warranted grievance and blame even where no individual agent is culpable for directly causing unjust outcomes. The paper also addresses objections concerning demandingness, excuse, and the limits of moral culpability in cases of structural injustice.

Speakers

Matheson Russell

Waipapa Taumata Rau │ University of Auckland

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

Political Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Virtue Signalling in the Classroom

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

Recent survey data (Romm & Waldman 2025) suggests that university students often project ideological alignment with their professors and classmates in order to succeed socially and academically. In other words, university students virtue signal in the classroom. In this paper, I set out to answer three questions: (1) What is classroom virtue signalling? (2) What are the impacts of classroom virtue signalling on the goals of university education? (3) What, if anything, should be done about classroom virtue signalling? In response to (1), I offer a characterisation of classroom virtue signalling. In response to (2), I argue that classroom virtue signalling compromises three educational goals: the acquisition of epistemic goods, the cultivation of autonomy, and the cultivation of intellectual virtues. In section (3), I argue that students, professors, and universities have duties to disrupt the practice of classroom virtue signalling so that the educational goals of universities can be better realised.

Speakers

William Tuckwell

Lecturer, Charles Sturt University

I am a Lecturer in philosophy at Charles Sturt University (CSU). Before becoming a lecturer, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Future of the Professions Research Group at CSU. Prior to joining CSU I was a Society for Applied Philosophy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Social Epistemology, In Person

2:00pm NZST

On Russell's So-Called Truth Primitivism

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

According to Truth Primitivism, truth is an unanalysable concept or property. Proponents of the view, especially Jamin Asay, have argued that the GE Moore and Bertrand Russell were early adopters of primitivism until they both abandoned the view in favour of the correspondence theory because neither one of them were able to reconcile how a proposition as a state of affairs could be false if truth is a primitive and unanalysable. In this paper, my focus will be Russell, and I will challenge the view that early Russell was a primitivist about truth; instead, once we have a clearer appreciation of how he understood propositions and the connection between truth and fact, it becomes clear that even early Russell was a correspondence theorist—albeit a special, unique form of correspondence not otherwise in the literature then or now.

Speakers

Joe Ulatowski

Conference Organiser, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Truth, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Against Computational Functionalism about Consciousness

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

Philosophers endorsing Computational Functionalism (CF) have argued we should afford AI systems moral consideration in virtue of their possessing (or possibly possessing) conscious states. I argue we have no good reason to think CF is true, and good reason to think it isn’t. I distinguish three versions of Computational Functionalism and give arguments against each. Identity CF says the property of a physical system implementing the right computation is identical to the property of physical system being in a conscious state. I show that on plausible assumptions about computational implementation we have a straightforward deductive argument against Identity CF. I then consider more popular versions of CF which say that the property of a physical system implementing the right computation is either ‘sufficient for’, or ‘necessary and sufficient for’ (rather than identical to), a physical system being in a conscious state. Responding to Chalmer’s dancing and fading qualia arguments, I argue we have no good reason to think that a physical system could be conscious in virtue of implementing a computation, and the idea ought to strike us as a bizarre and implausible.

Speakers

Luke Pistol

Stanford University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Harm Reduction in Non-Suicidal Self Harm

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

"A clinician suggests to a person who physically injures themselves without suicidal intent to use red ink instead to simulate the injury without causing physical harm."

Debates about harm reduction in non-suicidal self-harm (NSSH) usually focus on questions of safety, proportionality, and autonomy from a third-person perspective concerned with outcomes and professional responsibilities. Harm reduction, in this context, refers to interventions aimed at reducing physical harm without necessarily requiring immediate cessation of NSSH.
I argue that this approach is incomplete because it overlooks the communicative dimension of harm reduction interventions. The ethical significance of these interventions depends not only on clinical intentions, but also on how they are framed, offered, and interpreted by the person receiving care. Ethical evaluation requires attention to both third-person justification and first-person experience. An intervention may be clinically appropriate and voluntary, yet still be experienced as dismissive, corrective, or validating depending on how it is framed and received within the clinical encounter. This gap between professional justification and personal meaning is ethically important because harm can arise not only through physical outcomes, but also through the meanings conveyed and interpreted in care relationships."

Speakers

Snita Ahir-Knight

Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago

Snita (she/her) is the Programme Lead for the lived experience education and research programme World of Difference | He Ao Whakatoihara kore within the Department of Psychological Medicine, Wellington. She was previously a visiting research scholar in philosophy and a teaching fellow... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Bioethics, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Habitual Critique: Between Nature and Spirit

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

Lacanian critical theory provides invaluable resources for social critique, but must always do so by negotiating between its account of “constitutive” and “constituted” alienation – between the unavoidable forms of alienation involved in entering into socio-linguistic life, and the historical forms of alienation which arise due to particular social conditions. Theorising this connection remains necessary for a historically informed social critique which is nevertheless able to recognise the unavoidable structural forms of alienation of any such human society. Here, Robert Pippin’s Hegelian theorisation of alienation as a failure of self-reflexive social agency provides an important normative framework.
Critique thus relies upon a particular image of “human nature”. The “natural” in “human nature”, however, cannot be separated from its emergence from “nature as such, against Pippin’s insistence on the strict separation between nature and spirit. Here, the role of “habit” in G.W.F. Hegel’s account of the transition from “nature” to “spirit” (or “second nature”) thus allows for critique to be grounded in the conditions of life itself. Drawing on findings from philosophical anthropology, and building upon what theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou identify as its transformative core, far from being mere unconscious repetition, habit rather represents a heuristic for critical social analysis attendant to the historical and transhistorical forms of social life, one cognisant to the relationship between constitutive and constituted alienation.

Speakers

Melvin Kivinen

Australian Catholic University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Continental Philosophy, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Depending on Others: Towards a Unified Understanding of Virtuous Belief Formation

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

N3.01

In virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, someone’s exercise of “intellectual” virtues such as open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual humility is understood as key to responsible and knowledge-conducive belief formation. “Moral” virtues such as generosity, courage, and kindness are largely treated as distinct and separate from their intellectual counterparts.

However, recognition of our ubiquitous dependence on others for not only information but also norms for finding and interpreting such undermines individualist approaches and implies a more complex relationship between so-called intellectual and moral virtue. This paper argues that given our beliefs are often formed by knowledge from others and are mediated through social practices of knowing, our regard and treatment of others is necessarily implicated in belief-formation and the pursuit of knowledge.

Drawing primarily on work on social epistemic dependence and Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice (2003), I propose that social epistemic dependence suggests efficacious epistemic practices rely to some extent on ethical regard for and treatment of others. This claim motivates a reconsideration of the traditional distinction between moral and intellectual virtues and provokes a need for a virtue ethic of belief which unifies moral and intellectual concerns and practices.

Speakers

Melanie Dillon-Smith

University of New England

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
N3.01

Ethics, In Person

3:00pm NZST

A Path Out: Considering Trans Ideal Theory and Ideal Trans Theory

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

This talk looks at the tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory through the lens of trans and feminist philosophy.
On the one hand, it seems important to visualise liberatory futures: what are we fighting for? On the other hand, it can seem pointless to build pristine abstract theories when the debris of the present is choking us: what can we do from here? Utopianism doesn't put a roof over anyone's head. For that reason, ideal theory is often thought of as out of touch with real concerns; perhaps any reasonable socially-engaged philosophy is necessarily non-ideal?
Hence, I aim to draw on trans philosophy to explore this tension explicitly in the pursuit of seeking broader ambitions for the field.

In discussing the ambitions of both ideal and non-ideal social theories, I shall consider what kinds of critique are most useful when building social futures for oppressed groups.
Drawing on trans metaphilosophy and elements of 1990s gender theory, I thus argue that we do need ideal theory, due to the limitations of non-ideal theory. In this way, I propose that the best emancipatory theories of gender already integrate both ideal and non-ideal theory to envision a more fruitful and liberatory perspective on trans futures.

Speakers

Simone Anders

Monash University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, In Person

3:00pm NZST

All Talk, No Traction: Abstracta, Explanation, and Ontological Commitment

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.03

Explanatory appeals to abstract ‘objects’ (numbers, moral values/principles, possible worlds etc…) are ubiquitous in philosophy, science, and everyday reasoning. Cicadas emerge in prime-number cycles because of number-theoretic advantages, lying is wrong because it violates the categorical imperative, Celtic FC would have won yesterday’s match had the referee been unbiased. Many philosophers take such claims’ explanatory usefulness to justify ontological commitment to the abstracta involved. Yet, by definition, abstracta are spatially and causally removed from the concrete world we seek to explain, raising a fundamental question: when, if ever, does explanatory appeal to abstracta genuinely license belief in their existence?

To answer this, I propose a methodological framework which distinguishes merely representative/heuristic explanations from metaphysically substantive ones. Two criteria structure the framework: ‘Basis’, scrutinises the reality of explanans and explanandum (independent of their inclusion in a particular explanation); and ‘Relevance’, assessing whether the explanans stands in an appropriate ontic-explanatory relation to the explanandum.

Applying this framework to case studies in mathematics, morality, and modality, I argue that explanatory appeals to abstracta systematically fail both criteria. Abstraction may be an indispensable representational tool, but abstracta themselves are never adequate explanans for why the concrete world truly is as it is.

Speakers

Alex McQuibban

University of St Andrews/University of Stirling

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.03

Metaphysics, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Are Dreams Epistemically Relevant? From Scepticism to Dream Engineering

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

The question of how dreams can offer personal guidance and solutions has ignited the interest of humankind for thousands of years. Nonetheless, dreams have often been considered epistemically irrelevant or even deceptive, becoming the target of sceptical debates. Burgeoning research on the function of dreaming for memory integration as well as the development of dream engineering techniques aimed at harnessing dreams for creativity and learning call for a reassessment of the role of dreaming in epistemology. This work addresses unresolved questions concerning the potential use of sleep experiences for knowledge generation. By focusing on the concept of insight and how it is employed in the scientific literature on dreaming to implicitly uphold epistemic goals, I argue that at least a subset of dream uses, when adequately constrained, disclose opportunities for epistemic exploration and expansion. I will proceed by examining three cases and the conditions under which dreams can give rise to knowledge: lucid dreaming, creative ideation at sleep onset, and waking insight following dream discussion. My goal is to show how empirical work on dream consciousness carries tacit assumptions that have far-reaching implications for the epistemology of dreaming and the use of dreams for therapeutic purposes, thus warranting conceptual analysis.

Speakers

Gaia Mizzon

Monash University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Justifying a Republican Theory of Transitional Justice

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

Transitional justice is traditionally associated with democratic consolidation, yet this relationship is empirically contingent rather than guaranteed. Canada consolidated democracy without transitional justice, while Chad failed to democratize despite it. Moreover, transitional mechanisms can be double-edged, sometimes reinforcing illiberal regimes rather than dismantling them. These vulnerabilities raise a prior question: how should democracy itself be conceptualized to effectively support transitional justice?
This paper compares two interpretations of liberal democracy. The first, grounded in Isaiah Berlin's "freedom as non-interference," proves inadequate because it ignores structural power asymmetries and remains indifferent to regime type, leaving it unable to robustly reject authoritarianism. The second, grounded in Philip Pettit's "freedom as non-domination," offers a more defensible framework. Republican democracy targets arbitrary power and builds institutional safeguards for citizens. Through Pettit's model of contestatory democracy, citizens acquire meaningful capacity to challenge unjust policies and hold power accountable.
Nevertheless, overcoming entrenched domination may demand more than formal legalism alone. Institutional rules must be complemented by civic virtue and sustained social dialogue. This republican framework, attentive to both structural inequality and participatory agency, offers a normatively superior path for genuinely advancing transitional justice.

Speakers

Chunlin Liu

Associate professor, Chang Jung Christian University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

Political Philosophy, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Can Truth Subvert the Inference Barriers?

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

Long ago I tried to rescue No-Ought-From-Is from Prior’s counterexamples by reformulating it as the thesis that you can’t get a non-vacuous Ought from an Is. But (replies Nelson) once we help ourselves to the notion of truth we can construct logically valid arguments from non-moral premises to (non-vacuous) moral conclusions. Is Nelson’s counterexample logically valid? This depends on the nature of truth. If truth is transparent then his inference is valid but it is not a counterexample to No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. The ‘ought’ in his premises appears non-vacuously and is used as well as mentioned. Suppose we adopt a non-transparent theory of truth according to which we don’t officially know what the quoted statements mean? Taking my cue from Ramsey and Buridan I develop a formal theory of truth that relies on the notion of representing that. On this conception, Nelson’s argument is invalid but can be restored to validity by adding an extra premise; a premise, however in which ‘ought’ appears non-vacuously. So whether we adopt a transparent or a non-transparent theory of truth, No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is still stands which means that you can’t use truth to break down the barrier between substantively non-X premises and substantively X-conclusions.

Speakers

Charles Pigden

Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago

Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Truth, In Person

4:00pm NZST

Afternoon Break

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm NZST

MSB Foyer

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm NZST
MSB Foyer

Breaks

4:30pm NZST

Anxiety, Dying Authentically and Digital Duplicates for Palliative Care

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.20

It has recently been suggested that large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on the corpus of text from palliative care patients could be used to alleviate their distress by completing projects or relationships that would otherwise be cut short by their deaths. For example, a fine-tuned LLM could be used to complete the novel of a dying author. I contest the alleged benefits of this technology by drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger claims that our anticipation of death is significant because of its ability to induce anxiety, which he characterises as a collapse in the meaningfulness of our self-interpretations. This experience is valuable because it enables us to live authentically, that is to say, in a way that understands that we are not necessarily defined by any of our meaning-giving self-interpretations. I argue that fine-tuned LLMs would disarm death of anxiety and the benefits of authenticity, above all the ability to live with greater flexibility and openness to the present. After considering the potential benefits that fine-tuned LLMs may nonetheless bring to palliative care, I conclude that they should not replace the work of human therapists capable of guiding the dying through these intense existential feelings.

Speakers

Zachary Daus

Monash University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.20

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Epistemic Reasons Always Lose

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

Can practical reasons ever override epistemic reasons for belief — and if so, how should the two be weighed against each other? Existing accounts of how to weigh epistemic and practical reasons face serious problems: the combinational problem of how to combine permissive and prohibitive balancing, accusations of being ad hoc, and the inability to provide usable advice. Additionally, existing arguments for privileging one type of reason over the other are vulnerable to intuitive counterexamples. This talk will outline the problems faced in the existing literature and argue for a position that cuts through the existing debate: epistemic reasons carry genuine normative authority, but are always weaker than practical reasons. This position handles the aforementioned counterexamples and avoids the problems of existing weighing accounts. I conclude by addressing Hannon and Woodard's (2026) argument that social coordination provides a practical reason to always follow the epistemic norm, arguing that this does not hold in all cases.

Speakers

Danielle Lawrence

Volunteer, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Epistemology

4:30pm NZST

On the Special Omission Question

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.03

In this paper, I address the Special Omission Question (SOQ): under what conditions does a disjunction count as an omission? If omissions are events essentially specified as non-occurrences, then their conditions of occurrence can be formulated as disjunctions of overly varied disjuncts. This suggests that omissions are disjunctive events. For example, one might say that the universe omits to contain events that violate the laws of nature (see Lewis 1986a: 190). I suggest that this kind of case still counts as an omission, and I further discuss some additional difficult cases that have largely been ignored in the literature.
I consider three possible answers to the SOQ: always, never, and sometimes. Rather than decisively rejecting the first two options, I develop the ‘sometimes’ view: some disjunctions count as omissions, while others do not. This view provides a way to distinguish genuine omissions from arbitrary disjunctions. Compared with my theory, I suggest that Silver’s (2018) theory is not adequate to account for omissions.

Speakers

Huang Ping-Wei

National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.03

Metaphysics, In Person

4:30pm NZST

What Makes a Sport a Sport? On Folk Intuitions about Rules and Movement in Sport

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.01

Huizinga (1950) argued for a conceptual overlap between sport, games, and play. Others, like McIntyre (1981), contended that sport was a socially established cooperative activity. Still others maintained that the definitiveness of sport lies in the exemplification of specific criteria, such as competitiveness (Krein, 2014; 2015). No one has asked non-specialists about their views despite that they may have strong, considered views. In this paper, we report results of an experiment we conducted where we asked 879 participants to rate 36 activities on a sport-likeness scale. We hypothesised that participants would rate activities governed by constitutive rules (overcoming unnecessary obstacles to achieve a goal (Suits 1978), e.g., golf’s aim is to get the ball in the hole) more highly sport-like than those activities that are governed by facilitative rules (rules that facilitate an activity, e.g., the goal of sprinting is to run a short distance as fast as possible). We also hypothesised that activities with predominantly gross motor demands, such as rugby or American football, would be rated more highly sport-like than those activities that relied primarily on fine motor skill, like snooker or archery. While some results were surprising, our hypotheses were borne out by the data we collected.

Speakers

Joe Ulatowski

Conference Organiser, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Michael Hemmingsen

Tunghai University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.01

Other, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Experiencing Inner Awareness

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.05

Many philosophers claim that a special inner awareness persists in the background of all our conscious states. However, various attempts to gather phenomenological evidence for this view have yielded conflicting results. The dominant alternative strategy involves considerations of a more theoretical nature, such as appealing to inner awareness as the best explanation for things like memory, attention, self-knowledge, and disorders of consciousness. But this theoretical strategy has failed to convince the sceptics since they always find alternative (and in their view, better) explanations of the target phenomena. The result is a dialectically deadlocked debate over what is supposed to be a central dimension of consciousness. This talk motivates a return to the phenomenological strategy and makes an initial case for a hitherto underutilized technique in the contemporary debate—meditation—as a way to establish the ubiquity of inner awareness.

Speakers

Darryl Mathieson

PhD Student, Australian National University

I am a fourth year PhD student and Associate Lecturer at ANU, where I am supervised by Victoria McGeer, Frank Jackson, and Daniel Stoljar. My main area of specialization is the philosophy of mind, and more specifically on various issues about consciousness and self-consciousness... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.05

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Intending and Settling Practical Questions

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

N3.01

Proponents of the “inquisitive theory of mind” argue that intentions are among the attitudes which are question sensitive. Understood this way, to form an intention is to settle on an answer to a ‘practical questions,’ a question about what to do. But what is an answer to a practical question, and what is it to “settle” on one answer over others? In this paper I argue that, contra the extant question-sensitive theory of intention (Beddor & Goldstein 2023), settling on an answer to a practical question involves being in a mental state with imperative content. Hence, the question-sensitivity of intention recommends against the standard view on which intentions are attitudes toward propositional contents. On the view I defend, Imperativism, to intend to φ is to occupy a mental state with content akin to the imperative “φ!” in natural language. Imperativism is closely related to the most widely discussed non-propositionalist theory, the “do-ables view,” on which the content of an intention is an infinitival clause (e.g., “to φ”). While both the do-ables view and Imperativism capture the intuitive sense in which the objects of our intentions are acts, I show that only Imperativism can be plausibly squared with question-sensitivity.

Speakers

Annelisa O'Neal

PhD student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
N3.01

Philosophy of Mind, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Trusting God is Not Like Trusting Your Spouse

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.15

Faith is often defended not as blind belief, but as trust in God after belief that God exists has already been formed. On this view, trusting God is analogous to trusting a spouse, friend, doctor, or pilot. This paper challenges that analogy.
I argue that even if God’s existence is granted, trust in God’s present guidance differs from ordinary interpersonal trust in three respects.
First, interpersonal trust presupposes reasonable confidence in authorship. Before I decide whether to trust a message, I must first determine who sent it. Alleged divine guidance however, often arrives through thoughts, impressions, circumstances, and interpretations that are equally compatible with ordinary psychological explanations.
Second, interpersonal trust is corrigible. Trust grows because experience can confirm or challenge our assessment of another person’s reliability. By contrast, trust in God is often insulated from disconfirmation by explanations such as “yes, no, or wait.”
Third, trust in God is often rationalised retrospectively through selected memories and reconstructed narratives. Human relationships are also vulnerable to such bias, but they are constrained by observable behaviour, direct feedback, and third-party correction. Retrospective trust in God often lacks these constraints.
Together, these asymmetries challenge the God/Spouse analogy.

Speakers

Jared Brandon

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.15

Philosophy of Religion, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Explanatory Pluralism and the Epistemic Status of Spiritual Frameworks in Psychiatric Knowledge

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.02

This paper argues that explanatory pluralism provides the most defensible framework for governing psychiatric knowledge, and that the continued privileging of biomedical monism requires philosophical justification it has not adequately received. I contend that psychiatric phenomena are ontologically complex in ways that resist reduction to any single explanatory scheme, and that the systematic marginalisation of non-biomedical frameworks reflects the politics of knowledge production rather than their epistemic inadequacy. To ground this argument, I draw on Australian mental health consumer activism as a case study in which spiritual frameworks functioned as genuine competing explanatory systems. These were not pre-scientific residues but coherent accounts of psychological distress with their own internal logic, evidential basis in lived experience, and practical explanatory success. Drawing on Ian Hacking's concepts of interactive kinds and classificatory looping, I examine how the medicalisation of spiritual experience creates self-reinforcing cycles that delegitimise alternative frameworks structurally rather than on epistemic grounds. The paper concludes that recognising spiritual and experiential frameworks as legitimate contributors to psychiatric explanation is not a concession to relativism but a consequence of taking ontological complexity seriously. This has direct implications for how epistemic authority is distributed in clinical practice and mental health care design.

Speakers

Gemma Lucy Smart

PhD Candidate, University of Sydney

Gemma Lucy Smart is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where she researches the history of mental health self-help, consumer activism, and Mad Pride's relationship to the disability and neurodiversity movements. She is a senior lived... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.02

Social Epistemology, In Person

4:30pm NZST

A Market Failure in the Attention Economy

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.21

The attention economy is often blamed for the severe deterioration of credible, high-quality content on social media. This is a bit perplexing. I give my attention to some platforms in exchange for some entertaining content. The exchange itself seems perfectly innocuous, sounds like a textbook win-win situation. Where did everything go wrong?
Contrary to public opinion, I argue that the credibility crisis does not stem from the game of maximizing attention per se. Instead, the underlying problem comes from a market failure that plagues the attention market. A risk of using attention as currency is that it must be ‘paid’ before a consumer can evaluate the content's quality. You cannot determine if a post is entertaining or credible until you have seen it. Yet, once your attention is spent, the transaction is complete; you cannot claw it back even if the content is sloppy or false. This is a kind of information asymmetry. Economic theories show that information asymmetry often lead to adverse selection, a situation where low-quality goods inevitably squeeze out high-quality ones. This presentation will demonstrate how such market failure happens on social media, and how it ultimately fosters the rampant spread of misinformation and fake news online.

Speakers

Jovy Chan

Postdoc, Stanford University

Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.21

Truth, Remote

6:30pm NZST

Women in Philosophy - Get Together

Tuesday July 7, 2026 6:30pm - 9:30pm NZST

Boulder Co.

Join us for an informal Women in Philosophy get-together at Boulder Co in Hamilton.

Come along for a chat and a drink, stay for a bite to eat, or have a go at climbing. The venue has a café and bar, and attendees are very welcome to join socially without climbing.

For those who would like to climb, the cost is NZD $20 per person, plus NZD $5 for shoe hire. There is no cost for those attending socially.

Boulder Co is accessible for attendees with mobility needs. There is a ramp at the entrance as an alternative to the staircase, and from the bottom of the ramp there is access to the café/bar area and viewing areas for the climbs.

Location: Boulder Co, 15 Maxwell Place, Te Rapa, Hamilton
Cost: No charge for social attendees; NZD $20 climbing fee plus NZD $5 shoe hire for climbers
Please note: This is an optional event for conference registrants. Advance sign-up is required.

Sign up HERE

Tuesday July 7, 2026 6:30pm - 9:30pm NZST
Boulder Co.

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