Debunking arguments aim to show that our beliefs do not track the world, by identifying a certain etiology that confers negative epistemic status to our beliefs. For instance, we believe that murder is wrong. Debunker comes in by stating that we have such a belief because we evolved to belief that murder is wrong given that it is maladaptive. Since that is the case, our moral beliefs do not stand for moral facts. In this paper I aim to put forward a novel type of debunking arguments—the one that pertains to identity. Roughly, I claim that we have intuitions about what makes objects different from other objects and that such intuitions can be debunked. The first intuition—the unity intuition—states that we think that objects are singular if they have enough unity. The second intuition—the spatial boundary intuition—states that we think that objects are singular up to the point where they meet unoccupied space. The claim is that, analogously to a moral case, we evolved to have such intuitions which makes them epistemically problematic. If it weren’t for evolution, we wouldn’t think that objects are singular, nor we would have intuitions about what makes them singular. The upshot is that we have a reason to suspend or reduce credence to our beliefs about identity.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
Can empirical psychology—qua scientific discipline—incorporate objective moral truth? That is, are appeals to objective moral truth scientifically acceptable, viable, and legitimate—i.e., are they scientifically adequate? I consider this question through an examination of a particular case, namely, whether objective moral error is a viable scientific kind. I first examine objective moral errors per comprehensive moral theories proffered as the objective moral truth (“Objective CMT”). Importantly, I show that moral philosophical adequacy is not necessarily sufficient for scientific adequacy. I conclude that—currently—such objective moral errors are scientifically inadequate because, lacking a CMT well-established as the objective moral truth, condoning such errors yields the untenable result of different researchers using incompatible standards-of-moral-correctness that generate incommensurable versions of the kind. I reject two potential partners-in-guilt. Finally, I examine objective moral errors that contravene specific moral principles proffered as objective moral truths. I argue that because of the strength of metaethical skepticism within a scientific context, coupled with the availability of viable alternatives to objective moral truths—namely, standards-of-interest—all potential objective moral errors, as well as all appeals to objective moral truth, are scientifically inadequate and incompatible with empirical psychology (qua science).
Wednesday July 8, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
Universities have undergone seismic changes in the past several decades, both in Australia and internationally. Some of these changes continue to have significant implications for the discipline of philosophy and its place in the contemporary university. I focus on one of these, namely the impact agenda that emerged in the UK and Australia and has been embedded in research management policies and practice over the past 20 years. This agenda proffers an instrumental understanding of academic research, which is primarily valued for its capacity to contribute to economic growth, social cohesion and nation-building. Aligning with this agenda, an increasing number of philosophers are now involved in research programs that engage with industry organisations, communities and other stakeholders to address challenges faced by them. I refer to this as 'impact philosophy'.
Through reflecting on impact philosophy, I argue that the broader discipline of philosophy faces a dilemma. On the one hand, if it underestimates and/or rejects the significance of the impact agenda, it may become irrelevant to the contemporary university; on the other hand, if it embraces the impact agenda, it may lose a sense of itself as a discipline. As a proponent of impact philosophy, I conclude by highlighting the need to clarify the 'rare and valuable' contribution that philosophy - as philosophy - can make within the time of impact.
This paper responds to research in early child development on children’s ability to distinguish pretending from joking. These are interestingly related activities, as both engage children with atypical behaviour and speech: stimuli that in some way depart from how things are or should be. The research suggests that in learning to distinguish pretending and joking, children are learning to adopt quite different relations to norms. I will extrapolate from this suggestion, considering it as a route into understanding the norms and norm-violations that matter to sustaining a practice of fiction. On the view I am trying out, the fictional and the humorous do not smoothly and straightforwardly combine (even though it is wonderful to combine them). I will illustrate these claims with some examples of comic fiction that show the fictional and the funny putting norm-related pressure on each other. This discussion will also benefit from reflection on Tom Cochrane’s work on the limitations of humour.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Aphantasia, where individuals report lacking voluntary conscious visual imagery, has increasingly captured attention in empirical and philosophical literature. One fascinating aspect of this condition is: empirical findings suggest that aphantasics employ visual strategies to perform tasks—at least in some cases. The discrepancy between subjective reports and objective evidence motivates some researchers to defend the “unconscious” view, according to which aphantasics use unconscious visual imagery. In this talk, I will argue for the alternative, “conscious” view through the lens of metacognition.
When it comes to eliciting reliable introspective reports, consciousness research highlights a distinction between “visibility” measures and “confidence” measures. All studies on aphantasia use the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) to recruit participants. As the VVIQ asks participants to only indicate the “vivacity” of their mental images, it closely resembles a visibility measure. I contend that in determining whether aphantasics indeed rely on unconscious visual imagery, we should further investigate their confidence in the accuracy of their imagery-task performance.
Few studies on aphantasia have included confidence ratings. However, intriguingly, aphantasics typically exhibit good metacognitive sensitivity. These findings provide supporting evidence that they engage in conscious, task-relevant visual imagery.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Slavoj Žižek describes amorous love as a disruptive, fiercely personal event that involves someone developing a passionate attachment to another person, so that the loved one becomes a ‘fragile absolute’ that fills out the horizon of the lover’s existence with an infinite purposiveness. This love is inherently individualistic and, on the surface, is at odds with a political program of universalism according to which every person matters equally. In this paper, I will argue that Žižek’s conception of love does have a political dimension that involves a revolutionary group living in fidelity to a political event in a way that affirms the capacity of any subject to live beyond the strictures and interdictions of a particular political order or situation. I provide an account of how Žižek’s idea of love is rooted in his Hegelian rewriting of dialectical materialism, his adoption of an atheistic reading of Christianity, and his conception of universality. I will then consider some implications of Žižek’s politics of love in a contemporary context.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Buddhist Philosophy offers the concept of anattā, the principle of no-self that leads people to the always changing present in life. Buddhism believes that everyone needs to have one’s own responsibility to purify one’s life to reach its purification state out of the suffering cyle of saṃsāra. In 2028, Indonesia will celebrate the 100th birthday as a nation. It was through the Youth Pledge or Sumpah Pemuda in Indonesian, young Indonesians proclaimed three ideas of one motherland, one nation, and a unifying language: Indonesia. They came with this narration as a respond for the colonization practice for 350 years that eventually has brought Indonesia to its proclamation of independence in 1945. In parallel, Paul Ricœur comes with similar ideas that the concept of self has the unchanging side (idem) and the changing side (ipse). The balance of these sides of self helps people to form a narration of one’s own life to overcome one’s experience in life. By comparing the Buddhist’s concepts of anattā and self-purification with Paul Ricœur’s concept of self-narrative, we can reflect on the phenomenon of the Indonesian Youth Pledge as a capable self that leads to the purification process through the narrative process of a nation.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Critical thinking as a modern educational concept arguably began with John Dewey’s How We Think (1910), in which he characterized critical thought as reflective, evaluative and directed consideration of our beliefs. Since then, academic conceptualisation of critical thinking has been enriched by rapidly expanding contexts and discipline area growth. But this expansion of breadth has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the depth of our understanding of critical thinking or how it is to be developed. Nothing manifests this phenomenon more obviously than the broad range of definitions of critical thinking and the lack of consequent agreement about what it is and how it is best taught. This paper offers a solution to this problem that is both inclusive of existing definitions of critical thinking and more actionable than most in terms of its teaching and development. Using an analogy between science and thinking scientifically, it positions critical thinking as an area of study and thinking critically as a mode of thinking attuned to the quality of inferences.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In this presentation I critically examine some of the moral implications of delaying aggressive climate mitigation in favour of future reliance on carbon dioxide removal technologies to meet internationally agreed climate goals by the end of the century. I argue that delaying emissions reductions violates basic human rights among members of the current generation, including the right to life, health, and subsistence. This adds to a growing list of reasons to favour responses to climate change that include immediate, deep, and rapid emissions reductions over responses that do not.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-206
Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace proposed that the activities involved in mothering children facilitated a distinct mode of thought that she termed ‘maternal thinking’. In this paper, I examine my experience of becoming a mother and how it influenced my scholarly work. Maternity did not hinder my intellectual life; I experienced an explosion of intellectual energy that I found was facilitated by my maternity in ways like those theorised by Ruddick. However, I experienced a simultaneous feeling of becoming invisible to the academy (beyond a network of feminist colleagues), which was compounded by my status as an early-career and casually employed academic. Rather than my new role as mother limiting my career, the constraints of the university seemed to push my maternal self (and its rhythm of inquiry) out of its walls, and I find myself now remaining a scholar as a mother despite the institution. Here, I frame my own maternal thinking as ‘slow philosophy’, following Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, to make sense of this incongruence. I argue that framing maternal thinking as slow philosophy helps further illuminate the marginal position that women occupy in relation to the academy.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Over the last ten years, there has been a turn in metaphysics and logic towards higher-order languages: languages containing higher-order quantifier expressions that quantify into non-subject positions, such as those of predicates and sentences. As Theodore Sider has recently observed, this higher-order turn promises a paradigm shift involving “elegant and more accurate modes of expression, new solutions to old problems, transformation of problem spaces, and generation of new questions”. In order to avoid the charge of obscurity, however, proponents of this higher-order turn face the challenge of explaining what their higher-order quantifier expressions mean. Andrew Bacon has recently attempted to meet this challenge by appealing to the inferential roles these quantifier expressions are intended to have. In this talk, I will argue that this attempt fails.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I explore the metaphor of "nothing-over-and-aboveness" and the ontological "free lunch" as it features in neo-Aristotelian and Quinean approaches to ontology. The main question I consider is how should we cash out such talk. Does it track a metaphysically significant relation, or does it simply indicate a lack of ontological commitment? For instance, some metaphysicians, such as Jonathan Schaffer and Karen Bennett, have used grounding relations and explanation to argue that their ontologies are more parsimonious. There appear to be a range of relata and relations that may license such talk. For example, the aforementioned grounding relations, reduction, and identity relations, along with fundamentalia and derivata. I will also consider how the theory virtue of parsimony features in cases from metaphysics as compared to how it features in scientific practice. Finally, I defend the view that there may be no ontologically innocent entities, in line with a Quinean approach to ontology.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-262
In reconsidering the Socratic desire to ban poetry from public life, I set out by reading from some recent poetry. I cite Alain Badiou’s observation that Socrates objects not only that poetry imitates reality. More seriously, he fears a verisimilitude in poetic expression with which philosophy cannot compete. This objection is updated and used by Koethe, a contemporary poet philosopher, against the idea of poetry as a form of thought. Another classical objection to poetry is that it fails to deal in measurable qualities. Philosophy, however, is vulnerable to a similar charge. Philosophy and poetry may share a common cause at this point.
It is self-refuting to claim that all there is to be truly said is contained within fundamental physics. We may proceed in a more promising manner by developing an idea, à la Badiou, of the production of truth. An understanding of truth as something we produce does not exclude appraisals of truth and falsity. Rather, we need an approach to the tensions between poetry, prose and philosophy that permits us to speak of poetological, painterly, theatrical and musical ways of thought. Thus, in their autonomous forms, we regard them as ways of saying something about what they deal with.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper focusses on the problem of doxastic normativity in Hume i.e., on what basis does Hume approve of some methods of belief-formation over others, given his radically sceptical conclusions about the possibility of justified belief? Without an answer to this question, Hume seems left with no basis for discriminating between better and worse belief-forming methods, but clearly he seems to think he can.
I review a variety of existing approaches to the problem, including approaches based on irresistibility, stability, liveliness, practical or moral desirability and love of truth. I argue that, while many of these proposals identify factors which play important roles in Hume’s approved belief-forming methods, none of them is sufficient to characterise the basis on which Hume discriminates between such methods.
I put forward a proposal according to which Hume discriminates between belief-forming methods based on their “apparent reliability” in predicting and controlling events and argue that the proposed criterion avoids the problems identified with existing approaches. I also compare this proposal to other reliability-based proposals in the literature, arguing that the sceptical nature of the proposed criterion distinguishes it from those proposals in a way that is more consistent with Hume’s sceptical philosophy.
Finally, I identify the source of normativity for the criterion as the ability to anticipate and control events, which contributes in its turn to the practical benefits accruing from the` successful execution of our designs. On this account, the normativity of Hume’s belief-forming criterion is ultimately derived from its contribution to practical success, but its particular role in contributing to that success results in its own particular form of “relative normativity”– belief-forming mechanisms are judged good or bad according to their apparent reliability in anticipating and controlling events.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Humans are wishful thinkers: we are more likely to believe the things we want to be true (Windschitl et al., 2022). In contemporary psychology this phenomenon is known as desirability bias (Tappin, Van der Leer & McKay, 2017) and as a cognitive bias it is relatively understudied. From the perspective of scientific realism, desirability bias is irrational: reality is largely indifferent to our desires, but perception seems quite responsive to them. Desirability bias represents a key human cognitive vulnerability and therefore deserves investigation. There are a number of questions to ask of the phenomenon. How strong and robust is it? What moderates it? Can we reduce or enhance it? What might explain it? How does it relate to existing theories and literatures, such as self-deception, motivated reasoning and predictive processing? What is its relationship with (the much more famous) confirmation bias? How much certainty do we have about the above answers? I will review some of the literature that is relevant to these questions and discuss how we might go about working towards a satisfactory explanation for desirability bias.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Scrolling is a material practice of digital consumption, marked by repetitive, habitual absorption into digital platforms. Given the ubiquity of scrolling as a phenomenon, it is interesting that the practice remains largely unexplored in philosophical literature. This paper explores the relation between contemporary precarity and scrolling via the lens of Lauren Berlant’s notion of slow death. I phenomenologically analyse how fear and what Berlant calls ‘crisis ordinariness’ orient subjects toward scrolling as a salve – a mechanism for relieving the overwhelming pressure on their sensorium. In this context, scrolling can be understood as an attachment which provides for the subject agency in a lateral sense, a kind of empty space-making via distraction, which enables subsistence. I further analyse the temporal implications of scrolling: the transformation of time not only into an eternal present, but a form of dead time. I conclude by briefly considering relevant implications of my analysis for praxis – or, to put it another way, how the material practice of scrolling comes to reinforce the same post-Fordist structures which are responsible for the conditions of contemporary precarity in the first place.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
While writing aids like Grammarly promise to improve students’ work, they also marginalise the role played by teachers. To grasp the scope and implications of this problem, I turn to one of the earliest accounts of the good of learning and teaching we have, the Xunzi. This early Confucian text identifies two key components of the social value of education, which services like Grammarly threaten to undermine: the importance of learning proper models, li (禮), for self-expression and of accruing active effort, wei (為), in one’s studies.
While Grammarly can correct work to a tolerable standard, it does not teach proper models, which risks making students reliant on it not only to express themselves but to understand their work without its help. Moreover, while Grammarly primarily helps students to capitalise on the effort they do put into their studies by offering them significant shortcuts that again leave them dependent on this software. If AI writing aids risk making students more exploitable like this in turn for an easier time in the classroom, then we ought to be extremely worried about the genuine possibility that students, and perhaps even institutions, will delegate teaching responsibilities to this software.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
As the understanding literature continues to evolve, the notion of group understanding has become increasingly important. With the rise of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), we may say that AI systems can contribute to group knowledge, but it is an open question as to whether or not they can contribute to group understanding. In what follows, I argue that CAI agents can be contributing members of group understanding in inflationary cases. In the next section, I lay out Kenneth Boyd’s (2019) account of deflationary and inflationary group understanding. In section three, I consider what it means to call a CAI an agent. In section four, I look at CAI agents in deflationary group understanding cases and conclude that the obstacles are too much to overcome. In section five, I look at AI agents in inflationary group understanding cases and argue that we can decouple trust relations from group grasping. In section six, I consider objections to my view.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
This paper examines whether Analects 14.31 supports the view that trust ought to function as a default normative stance. Through a comparative analysis of interpretations by Du Haitao, Lv Mingxuan, and Liu Xuehan, the study identifies three competing models of Confucian trust: default obligation, virtue-conditioned posture, and cultivation-based achievement. It argues that Analects 14.31 does not prescribe unconditional trust but instead embeds trust within a virtue-ethical framework that prioritizes moral discernment (xian jue) and sustained self-cultivation (gongfu). Drawing on this structure, the paper offers a Confucian critique of contemporary trust theories, especially those advocating structural or voluntarist models. In doing so, it proposes a virtue-based alternative rooted in agent-sensitive ethical responsiveness.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-206
In a forthcoming paper I critique Holly Lawford-Smith’s recent book Gender Critical Feminism for both the incoherence of its underlying metaphysics of sex and gender, and the problematic political effects of that metaphysics. In this talk I will first rehearse the crux of that argument, and then use it to motivate a further question: if bad metaphysics leads to bad politics, what kind of metaphysics might help bring about a liberatory politics?
Consider the following version of the Direct Argument:
a. Either the butler or the gardener did it. b. (And it may not be the butler.) c. So, if the butler didn’t do it, the gardener did.
According to material conditional interpretation of indicative conditionals, it is easy to explain why this is a great argument: Because it is truth-preserving. However, many, if not most, philosophers deny that the indicative conditional is the material conditional. But if it is not truth-preserving, then why is this a great argument? To answer this question, Boylan & Schultheis (2022) have recently defended the Qualitative Thesis, which has generally been taken to be a fundamental constraint on indicative conditionals. According to this thesis, the Direct Argument is knowledge-preserving.
The Qualitative Thesis: When you leave open A, the indicative conditional A > B is knowable if and only if the material conditional A ⊃ B is knowable (Boylan, 2024).
In this paper, I provide a counterexample to the Qualitative Thesis. But instead of just rejecting the Qualitative Thesis, I defend a qualified version of it that overcomes the problem with the original version by taking into account the ambiguity of conditionals.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Was there any event in human history whose occurrence was inevitable? Mainstream theories roughly follow Ben-Menahem’s sensitivity principle, stating that the necessity/contingency of a historical event depends on its degree of sensitivity to the initial conditions of its occurrence. In contrast, I propose to account for historical inevitability using the idea of a (metaphysical) causal sufficient condition. It provides a new theoretical framework and an empirical methodology. The obtainment of a set of events within the target event’s initial conditions, whose types constitute one configuration of the causal sufficient condition(s) of the event type to which the target event belongs, leads to its inevitable occurrence. That is, a historical event token occurred inevitably once a configuration of its causal sufficient condition was realised. Section I briefly illustrates the proposed account. Section II elaborates on explicating historical inevitability by causal sufficient and necessary conditions. Section III draws on interventionist counterfactual analysis to delve deeper into the causal and formal aspects of causal sufficient (and necessary) conditions. Section IV explores an empirical methodology especially suitable for studying the inevitable occurrences in human history. It utilises interventionist ideas to explain the formation of hypotheses of causal sufficient and necessary conditions for applicable historical event types.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
FigJam and Co is a proud 2nd-Gen Indigenous business. They are descendants of Gunditjamara and Ngarrindjeri mobs from SW Victoria and SE South Australia and acknowledge the elders of the Jagera, Yuggera and Ugarapul country on which we live, work, trade and travel. Since 1995, their skilled chefs have created naturally delicious catering for corporate events in Southeast Queensland. Each morning before sunrise, their dedicated team is busy preparing tasty food with fresh Australian ingredients in their Stones Corner kitchen.
They also manufacture FigJam Collections, a range of gourmet condiments bursting with real flavours and up to 98% Australian ingredients! They source seasonal ingredients and nutritious superfoods such as Davidson plum, Tasmanian pepperberry, lemon myrtle, old man salt bush, finger lime, pigface, purslane and anise myrtle direct from First Nation peoples, growers, producers and farmgate.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST GCI-Auditorium
This panel brings together philosophers at different career stages to explore diverse forms of community engagement beyond the traditional academic scope of philosophy. Panellists will discuss their experiences with public philosophy, board and policy work, media contributions, educational partnerships, and creative collaborations. The conversation will cover motivations for community involvement, practical pathways into different types of work, and the challenges and rewards of translating philosophical expertise for broader audiences. Panellists will share insights about balancing academic and community commitments while building meaningful partnerships outside the university. Whether you’re curious about public engagement or looking to expand your current outreach, this session offers practical perspectives on how philosophical training can serve wider social purposes. Audience perspectives on, and experiences with, philosophy in the community are very welcome.
Regarding folk intuition about aesthetic normativism, empirical evidence presents conflicting results: according to Cova and Pain’s (2012) study, folk intuitions deny the idea that aesthetic judgments are normative. This result undermines Kant’s view that it is common sense that aesthetic judgments are normative. But Andow’s (2022) study reveals more complex findings, which show that folk intuition, in some cases, endorses a normative perspective. Harnessing the two-dimensional semantics, this paper aims to reconcile this conflict by arguing that the folk account of aesthetic anti-realism is conditional. To support this claim, a small-scale empirical study was conducted. The results show that people tend to adopt an incompatibilist view in imagined scenarios, but a compatibilist view in actual-world contexts. Finally, this paper proposes a conditional reinterpretation of Kant’s “subjective universality”.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Whether or not we have free will has long been a philosopher’s question, but in the last 50 years, neuroscientists have claimed to be able to weigh in on the problem. I begin by reviewing the philosophical landscape of free will, which is dominated by the question of whether or not determinism is true, and argue that neuroscience cannot provide evidence for or against the truth of determinism, so cannot bear on the problem in that respect. I then turn to another way in which neuroscientists have tried to provide evidence that we lack free will, by drawing on evidence that they interpret as showing that our conscious will is inefficacious. I argue that new ways of thinking about how to interpret that evidence undermines the conclusions that typically had been drawn. I close by considering how this new interpretation of the neural data may bear upon some standard philosophical positions in the free will debate.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper explores whether Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia might be understood not as the highest good, but as one level within a nested hierarchy of flourishing. I consider the possibility that 'good' functions less as an indefinable property and more as a fundamental orientation—akin to 'north' on a moral compass—that emerges at three interconnected levels: biological continuity, individual flourishing, and civilizational advancement.
Drawing primarily on Aristotelian virtue ethics, I examine how each level might provide necessary conditions for the next while being transformed by what emerges from it. The paper investigates whether this framework could illuminate the relationship between biological nature and ethical life without reducing one to the other. In particular, I explore how virtues might cascade through these levels, taking different forms while serving interconnected purposes. Rather than claiming to resolve long standing metaethical puzzles, this paper offers a preliminary sketch of how individual eudaimonia might serve as a bridge between biological imperatives and societal flourishing.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-206
In this paper, I discuss preferences over gambles that seem intuitively rational, and that many real-world agents hold, but that deviate from orthodox normative decision theory. These preferences even deviate from the various less orthodox decision theories designed to accommodate risk aversion. This is because such preferences exhibit not risk aversion, but instead regret aversion: a preference for one’s chosen option to be more likely to actually turn out better (or perhaps significantly better) than the alternatives. Is regret aversion rational? Plausibly, yes. Beyond mere intuitions about cases, I offer two further motivations. The first is that regret aversion is needed to reflect at least some concern for doing what is objectively best, and it is plausible that such a concern is rational (perhaps even rationally required), especially in moral decision-making. The second motivation is that regret aversion correctly diagnoses and treats what’s wrong with so-called ‘fanatical’ verdicts in cases of extremely low probabilities and extremely high stakes. There are also reasons to think regret aversion irrational: it leads to violations of several widely-held and seemingly plausible principles of rationality. Perhaps these violations constitute a decisive objection to regret aversion. Or, perhaps, regret aversion constitutes a decisive objection to all normative decision theories so far proposed.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In classical extensional mereology, it is provable that if there are no Fs, then the universe is the general product of the Fs. For example, if there are no unicorns, then the universe is the general product of the unicorns. This paper argues that the source of this counterintuitive theorem lies not in classical extensional mereology itself, but in the classical treatment of restricted existential quantification, according to which if there are no Fs, then all Fs are Gs. For example, if there are no unicorns, then all unicorns have tentacles. It also argues the problem is not resolved by rejecting universalism or extensionalism, nor by adopting free or plural logic.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-262
There is a pervasive folk view that feelings such as pain are causes of behaviour. We say we withdrew our hand from the hotplate because it hurt or that we flinched at the needle because it stung. The causal role of pain is widely implicated in theories of learning and decision-making. But what if this commonsense idea that feelings cause behaviour is just wrong? To date, there is no known mechanism for how subjectively experienced pain directly modulates neural activity and it is hard to see how there could be. Pain cannot open ion channels to generate action potentials. On this basis, we contend that the real cause of behaviour is neural activity and that feelings of pain have no known causal role. This raises the question of whether pain has any function at all—i.e., whether it has causal powers or is merely epiphenomenal. Epiphenomenalism faces the intractable problem of explaining how such an attention-consuming feeling as pain could be epiphenomenal and yet still have survived evolutionary selection. In response, we infer from the available neuroscientific evidence that the best explanation is that pain has a novel, non-causal function and that decisions to act are instead caused by an internal decoding process involving threshold detection of accumulated evidence of pain rather than by pain per se. Because pain is necessarily implicated in the best explanation of subsequent decision-making, we do not conclude that pain is epiphenomenal or functionless even if it has no causal influence over those decisions or actions that issue from those decisions. On this view, pain functions to mark neural pathways that are the causes of behaviour as salient, serving as a ground but not a cause of subsequent decision-making and action. This perspective has far-reaching implications for diverse fields including neuropsychiatry, biopsychosocial modelling, robotics and brain-computer interfaces.
Deborah Brown is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Her research interests include philosophy of mind... Read More →
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Shinran, the founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect in Japan, developed a radical teaching that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. He considered himself a wicked person and presented the complete ‘acceptance of helplessness’ that he could not save himself as the key to salvation. In contrast, William James emphasized the subjective determination and will of humans in religious faith. He argued that humans can actively choose their own belief, strengthen their faith and live an ethical life through continuous practice even in uncertain situations. He identified human will as the central condition of faith.
At first glance, the soteriology of Shinran and William James on faith seem to be contradictory. The author thinks that Shinran lacks consideration of human subjectivity and the possibility of self-development through continuous practice, while William James lacks consideration of the relationship with the absolute. In conclusion, these two perspectives are inter-complementary. And by synthesizing these two religious philosophies, we can consider how we can establish a balanced relationship between ourselves and the absolute in the midst of human existential crises.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Despite the increasing significance of the notion of aesthetic education to pedagogic theory and aesthetics, it has yet to be seriously considered in relation to mathematical education. This gap in the literature is all the more pressing given that mathematical modelling and reasoning underpin the technology and sciences required to overcome the climate crisis. Since the German tradition of aesthetics has often associated mathematics with instrumentality, mathematical beauty has been implicitly considered a contradictio in terminis. By contrast, in this essay I will argue that Bernard Bolzano’s work—a rare example of a mathematician who writes about aesthetics—opens up the aesthetic dimension of mathematical experience. Moreover, I will argue that the potential of aesthetic education—both as a response to Plato’s accusation against the poets and as a practical theory of the social function of art—will not be fully realised until the German aesthetic tradition has adequately reckoned with mathematical beauty. Through investigating this previously unexplored dialogue between the sciences and humanities, I hope to demonstrate the expansive possibilities of this enriched notion of aesthetic education for future scholarship in pedagogy, aesthetics, the history of German philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Leibniz often uses a mirror analogy to explain his monads. Referring to a monad as a simple substance, he writes in a typical passage: “each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe” (M 56). Although Leibniz’s mirror analogy is well-known, it is not well understood. Accordingly, the goal of my talk is to show how Leibniz’s mirror analogy can shed light on his monadic metaphysics. Unlike other commentators, my strategy is to draw on Leibniz’s writings on perspectiva because it is now clear that Leibniz had expertise in a branch of mathematics known as perspectiva and that his mirror analogy is based on his work in perspectiva.
My talk is divided into three parts. First, I outline a fact that Leibniz learned from perspectiva, which is that any point on a body can be projected onto a drawing in such a way so as to preserve its relations to other points on the body. I then claim that Leibniz took this fact to imply that there is an equivalence between a body and its perspectival representations. I close by sketching how this equivalence can make sense of Leibniz’s thesis that a body is an aggregate of monads.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
People use their commonsense thinking about the past to inform their decisions. Intuitive historical thinking is therefore pervasive in the social and cognitive lives of humans. This type of cognition has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historians – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, concepts of time, or causal reasoning – without directly studying intuitive historical thinking. To remediate this lacuna, we investigate intuitive historical thinking, referred to as ‘intuitive history’. We argue against the view that intuitive history can be reduced to any one of the cognitive tools used by intuitive history. The processes and phenomenology of intuitive history are linked to three types of interrelated activities routinely conducted by intuitive historians: managing historical information perceived as significant, which includes searching, gathering, storing, and updating information about the past; the interpretation of historical information, which may include the intuitive historian’s distinctive experiences, assumptions, emotions, and evaluations; and the use of historical information. Interpretative processes can be influenced by the assumption of pastness, singularity, reality, connectivity or causation, and significance. We review evidence suggesting that intuitive historians routinely use these assumptions to develop their inquiries into past entities.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make decisions for them. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment. Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 “local” generative AI (GAI) stories each week. In the coming years, such “generative AI slop” will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018) describes a conceptualisation of social media as clearly morally objectionable. Lanier’s call is ultimately to delete social media accounts or abstain from participation. Participation perpetuates its dangers, but to what extent are individual users morally responsible for their social media accounts? This paper explores that question through a three-fold theory of responsibility. The first two aspects of this theory apply Robin Zheng’s framework of accountability and attributability (2016) to the problem of social media as proposed by Lanier. Then the third aspect looks at the element of necessity and how it hinders the practise of moral responsibility when it comes to the use of and participation in social media. Although social media evidently has moral harms, not everyone has the capability to refrain from using it without significantly impairing other aspects of their life. In order to promote an effective change to social media and the Internet, the disparity between the levels of responsibility amongst individuals must be taken into account.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Authentic subjectivity plays a central role in Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments in both The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949). In this paper, I unpack what it means to be an authentic subject. Beauvoir argues that freedom is the ultimate value, which places great responsibility on us to recognise and work towards our own freedom and that of others. Furthermore, to be authentic one must recognise, rather than deny, our ambiguous existence as both transcendent beings who construct and pursue ends freely, and immanent beings whose existence relies on the conditions of life being met consistently.
Patriarchal society relegates women (and others) to the immanent sphere, while simultaneously devaluing that sphere. This is evident in the widespread destruction of our ecosystems and the continued devaluing of reproductive and care labour. Implicit in Beauvoir’s argument, I suggest, is the notion that to be an authentic subject one must challenge the dominant system of values that devalues and exploits the immanent sphere. I extend Beauvoir’s work to argue for the importance of women and other oppressed people working together to create an alternative value system that authentically recognises the ambiguity of existence, and moreover, the value of the immanent.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Trivalent accounts of conditionals imply that an indicative conditional ""if A then C"" gets the value undefined when the antecedent A is false. Due to how they handle negation, these theories appear to wrongly predict that an indicative conditional presupposes the truth of its antecedent. However, as argued by Stalnaker (1975), the utterance of a conditional presupposes something weaker, namely that the antecedent is compatible with the context of utterance.
In the first part of this paper, we use the trivalent framework for indicative conditionals and epistemic modals presented recently by Egré, Rossi and Sprenger (ERS) in ""Trivalent conditionals, Kratzer style'' to resolve this tension and to adequately derive this Stalnakerian presupposition. We derive it from the fact that (i) conditionals and modals are evaluated not merely extensionally, but relative to an information state, and (ii) from a particular instance of Grice's Maxim of Quantity, which we call ""Avoid Void''.
In the second part, we use this principle to restrict some problematic inferences of the connexive logic of conditionals put forward by Cooper (1968) and recast by ERS (2025) as a logic of certainty preservation, like the entailment from ""not A"" to ""if A then C"" (for A, C factual).
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In philosophical circles it is widely understood that Michel de Montaigne was a humanist. It is less so understood that he was a Catholic. Drawing on rich experiential research that has culminated in a visit to the cenotaph of Montaigne in Bordeaux, France, the Sanctuary of Our Lady Fátima in Fátima, Portugal, and the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands, Scotland, Woodman outlines a modern case for the existence of God using a novel humanistic approach.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-262
Enactivism has recently faced criticism for either leaning too heavily on philosophical speculation without clear scientific grounding, or relying on some dated empirical work in cognitive science, especially concerning sensorimotor actions. This paper uses metabolic and microbiome research as a case study to help illuminate both the problem and a path forward. Although “autopoietic” enactivism has fruitfully drawn on research in evolutionary developmental biology, niche construction theory, and on phenotypic plasticity, it has yet to fully integrate insights from microbiome research. We argue, first, that a closer look at metabolism and the physiological roles microbiota play in hosts challenge some of the core autopoietic concepts, including self-production, autonomy, and operational closure. It also introduces heteronomy and symbiosis into cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary processes, and suggests a rethinking of enactivism’s traditional avoidance of mechanistic or reductionist explanations. We also argue there is an epistemic need for a philosophy of science that clarifies how to integrate more mechanistic and reductive biological programs with holistic enactivist frameworks, and how to reconceptualize the relationship between organisms, their micro-physical parts, and their environmental context. Ultimately, due to these challenges, we contend that enactivism needs to moderate its commitments to autopoietic theory.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-206
Descartes’ rejection of the resemblance between sensory ideas and extramental objects and the inferior status of the former in his epistemology makes researchers believe that Descartes takes resemblance as the principle for veridical representation of intellectual ideas. On top of that, they attempt to explicate the nature of resemblance through property-sharing and identity, which is upheld by the scholastic reading of Descartes’ distinction between formal being and objective being. I contend that resemblance as the principle of representation cannot be sustained as it is theoretically incompatible with Descartes’ substantial dualism and universal conceptualism, and it is textually ungrounded. On top of that, I propose my reading of the objective being according to which it only denotes ideas’ ontological status.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Causation in classical computation is relatively simple – it involves a series of events, each causally dependent on its predecessor. Causation in neural networks can be more complex. One reason for this is the possibility of recurrent or re-entrant signals. This paper investigates this topic. First, drawing on the analysis of Anne Treisman, I look at the role that recurrence may play in binding – which in this context can be thought of as the combination of simple representations into more complex representations. Second, I analyse the kinds of causal patterns involved here through Luigi Pasinetti’s work, recently translated into English, on causal dependence and interdependence. The idea, roughly speaking, is that neural networks that bind simple representations into complex representations through some kind of recurrent activity will be comprised of states in relationships of interdependence, rather than the relations of casual dependence that characterise classical computation. In this way, it is suggested, Pasinetti’s concepts can be used to distinguish the causal patterns that characterise classical computation from those that characterise the kinds of neural networks described here.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Friendship is a central relationship in our lives, and exploring the nature of friendship has been of significant philosophical interest. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that “nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things.” Aristotle accounts for three types of friendship. His account has since been reworked and built upon by numerous philosophers. The nature of the parent-child relationship has also been significantly explored by philosophers. However, analysis of parents and children as friends has been much less prevalent. While the ‘Friendship Model’ of filial obligations presupposes that parents and children can be friends, few philosophers have grappled with whether parents and children can become friends. In light of this deficit, our aim is to consider what constitutes a friendship, and whether parents and adult children can ever satisfy those conditions. Joseph Kupfer and Laurence Thomas both argue that parents and children cannot satisfy the conditions for friendship. We will argue that while not all parents and children can fit the conditions of friendship, some can.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Codd's Theorem, a fundamental result of database theory, asserts that relational algebra and relational calculus have the same expressive power on relational databases. We explore Codd's Theorem for databases over semirings and establish two different versions of this result for such databases: the first version involves the five basic operations of relational algebra, while in the second version the division operation is added to the five basic operations of relational algebra. In both versions, the difference operation of relations is given semantics using semirings with monus, while on the side of relational calculus a limited form of negation is used. The reason for considering these two different versions of Codd's theorem is that, unlike the case of ordinary relational databases, the division operation need not be expressible in terms of the five basic operations of relational algebra for databases over an arbitrary positive semiring; in fact, we show that this inexpressibility result holds even for bag databases.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Some have argued that "believes that p" is a vague predicate; others have denied it. However, none have applied the standard diagnostics to test this claim. I intend to do just that.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-206
