In his small, often-neglected book Verteidigungsrede fur die Philosophie (1966), philosopher Josef Pieper offers an ingenious criticism of scientism, the thesis that all knowledge is from science. While proponents of scientism are few and far between for well-known problems such as its self-referential incoherence, science's descriptive and explanatory limits, extra-scientific assumptions, and failure to take seriously the qualitative features of reality (plus its materialist underpinnings, though not all are worried on this matter, no pun intended), nonetheless Pieper's criticism displaces both scientism and the move towards so-called "weak scientism" (the thesis that science is broader than natural sciences) and "epistemic opportunism" (the thesis that we should be optimists about scientific success). Following the demise of the Early Vienna Circle and logical positivism on what "empirical" and "observation" mean, Pieper's argument is that scientism intrinsically carries with it an implausible concept of experience, and so should be rejected. Here is the structure of the argument. Because science is an empirical (a posteriori) endeavor, it requires an intelligible notion of experience (or observation). Scientism must say that what exhausts experience is simply the natural world as experienced by our senses. However, this leaves out much of the world as we experience it, not only in its extra-scientific qualities (Schrödinger provides some entertaining examples) but also in the objects of experience themselves ("moral experience", as some call it, is a paradigmatic example). The theoretical advantages of this broad(er) account of experience (which is incompatible with scientism) are its alignment with moral-epistemic virtues like epistemic justice, as well as science's praise for dispassionate objectivity. Broader accounts of experience carry concerns as well, especially Platonic concerns about appearances versus reality, but all this shows - says Pieper - is that the philosophical act is indispensable.
Thursday July 9, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
This talk will explore Aristotle’s concept of tragic wonder (to thaumaston), accompanied by shock (ekplexis). Despite the enormous interest in the Poetics, not many scholars (e.g., Kyriakou 1995, 88-96; Drake 2010) have analyzed closely the importance of wonder for best tragedies. While any unusual elements can arouse wonder in Methaphysics (1.982b12-14), tragic wonder should follow a narrower pattern: a logical plot structure that turns “beyond expectation” (para tēn doxan, Poetics 9.1452a3). This preference merits a deeper analysis than it has received. We shall investigate (1) why the Homeric epic seems to be given more freedom than tragedy in constructing wondrous incidents; (2) the reasons for which even the illusion of a precise dramatic purpose is better than randomness and (3) why this paradoxical tragic structure (logical and yet culminating in shock) surpasses all the other types of plots in the Poetics. As an illustration, we will focus on a puzzling case study, Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, which remains an Aristotelian favorite for achieving the wondrous effect despite ending with a series of illogical incidents. Finally, a sharp distinction will be drawn between the Aristotelian preferences and modern ideas of dramatic suspense.
Thursday July 9, 2026 6:00am - 6:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
It is generally accepted that Leibniz’s a posteriori argument which seeks to establish that force, measured by mv2 rather than mv, is conserved in the universe, has direct bearing on his broader metaphysical agenda. Leibniz is not simply introducing a new physical quantity and an argument for its conservation. He seeks to furnish a metaphysical foundation of mechanical physics.
This aim, arguably, is even more patent in his a priori argument for the conservation of actio. As Leibniz writes to De Volder, this argument is the “gate” through which one is to pass to the right metaphysics. I offer to bring into relief the metaphysical significance of the concept of intensity (intensio) in Leibniz’s a priori argument. Leibniz argues that quantity of actio is a product of intensity and extensity (extensio). Intensity is either velocity (when extensity is space) or square of velocity (when extensity is time). When taken in the latter sense, I argue, intensity receives a metaphysical inflection. Scholars have traced this notion to the medieval language of latitudo formarum. I contend that it denotes a degree of primitive activity constitutive of a singularity of substance, akin to Scotus’s notion of intensity as a degree of being’s perfection.
Thursday July 9, 2026 7:00am - 7:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
Psychiatry faces profound challenges a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Most notably, there are various philosophical disputes pertaining to a) dimensional vs. categorical models of mental disorder, b) the status of psychiatric kinds, c) states vs. traits as the central constructs of psychiatry, and d) the language of “mental disorder” vs. “mental variation.” Furthermore, these ontological disputes are accompanied by methodological disputes regarding which causal factors are most relevant to formulating generalizations about particular mental disorders. Meanwhile, the DSM faces both a validity crisis and a comorbidity crisis. These problems have motivated some in the field to formulate new research traditions– such as RDoC and HiTOP– which offer distinct and novel approaches to the subject matter of psychiatry. The central claim that I advance here is that contemporary psychiatry approximates a pre-paradigmatic Kuhnian science. I take Kuhn’s theory of scientific practice and change as an idealized model– one which abstracts away from the details of particular episodes in the histories of particular sciences, but which nevertheless presents an “ideal type” for how scientific progress often occurs. Two alternative explanations that I will address here are 1) the Human Science Explanation and 2) the Medical Science Explanation.
Thursday July 9, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST ONLINE ONLY
Thinking in terms of probabilities can give us a valuable lens on uses of vague language. In particular, it holds out the promise of bringing formally-tractable theories closer to empirical observations about how speakers actually use vague language. However, most existing applications of probability to vague language assume a classical approach to probability. This may be fine as a first approximation, but does not deal well with certain observed phenomena that have been used to motivate formal treatments of vague language based on nonclassical logics. Here I have in mind some phenomena around what have been called "borderline contradictions". In particular, speakers seem relatively happy to agree, of a borderline case of "tall" (for example), that they are both tall and not tall; but speakers are also resistant, in such cases, to agree that such a person is tall, or that they are not tall. These phenomena have been used to motivate three-valued non-probabilistic theories of vague language.
In this talk, try to bring these approaches together, in a way that hopefully achieves some of the virtues of both probabilistic and nonclassical approaches. I give an outline of some of the reasons probabilistic approaches to vague language seem promising and enlightening. Then I turn to borderline contradictions, arguing that classical probabilities are not well-suited for understanding this phenomenon. Finally, I make steps towards a theory of nonclassical probabilities that (I hope) can achieve the goods of existing probabilistic theories of vagueness, while fitting with a plausible approach to borderline contradictions.
Scholarly accounts of Hobbes’s theory of passions focus on fear of death and glory. Honour is often conflated with glory. I argue that honour is not a passion but a power. Honouring is a natural attribute that recognises another's higher value (power). Honour is always a relative term that varies with the standing of the parties and the context. If one is honoured too highly, this is flattery. If too lowly, then one is dishonoured.
Given the ubiquity of flattery and miserliness, how do we know true honour? While not explicit, Hobbes suggests that self-knowledge measures honours proffered and being dispassionate assists since passions reduce power. The constraints on honour are clearer. Most significant is Hobbes’s principle of equality. In the seventeenth century, honour was closely aligned to social status: one should act honourably within one’s social rank. Hobbes sweeps rank aside, insisting we are equal as members of a species. If inequality does exist, we should treat others as equals in the interest of peace. Honour, then, demands modesty in the name of equality and acceptance of impermanence in context and status. Though modest, honour can be valued more highly than life itself, as in war and duels. Used wisely, it is a powerful tool for the sovereign.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-206
Decoloniality is gaining increasing traction in efforts to change the colonial-rooted structures and practices within global health. In Global Health Research (GHR), decoloniality challenges historical injustices, power dynamics, and epistemic injustices in research practices with reformative options. While some recent initiatives towards decolonising GHR draw on solidarity as a guiding value, there are limited works that connect decolonial conceptualisations of solidarity to decoloniality in GHR. This article links a decolonial account of solidarity from the global South to the call for decoloniality in GHR. Using a beehive allegory as an example of conceptualising solidarity in African culture, it argues that such an account has profound implications for addressing the problems of power hierarchies and epistemic injustice in GHR. Linking a decolonial account of solidarity to decoloniality in GHR helps to re-orient the logic of supremacy and promote humility. This paper considers possible objections against a decolonial account of solidarity and calls for more decolonial conceptualisations of solidarity and other values that can further drive the GHR decoloniality agenda.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The Sāṁkhyakārikā is one of the classical texts of the Sāṁkhya philosophy. In this text, the concept of Puruṣa is regarded as 'a pure conscious being' and the ultimate reality of the universe. It relates to Prakṛti for an evolution. During evolution, if a living creature is created, an element of Puruṣa is believed to be embedded in it, i.e., life/consciousness. Since many living creatures exist on the earth, a plurality of selves exist. We consider a living creature (i.e., a person) a 'narrative self.' In contrast to a narrative self, we regard Puruṣa as the 'minimal self.' Against this backdrop, the paper examines the minimal self's origin, nature, and function. It elucidates the differences between the 'minimal self' and a 'narrative self.' It analyzes Sāṁkhyakārikā's arguments about the minimal self and narrative self by relating them to Dan Zahavi's and Shaun Gallagher's interpretations of the minimal and narrative self. The paper illustrates transcendental and empirical consciousness by considering the minimal and narrative selves. In the end, the paper submits that the minimal self is a prerequisite for the existence of a narrative self, and they have an inherence relation to their subsistence.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
One of Benedetto Croce's main teachings is 'all history is contemporary history': by this he meant that, however distant in time an event is, it is contemporary because we remember it and think of it to solve an intellectual problem that concerns us now. For example, an entity X, the English civil war, is contemporary to us and exists now when we think of it because of our present need to oppose absolutism in the name of freedom of thought.
If no one thought of the English civil war in the 17th century, it would not exist at all. The present is constantly changing and every new (emerging) thought about the English civil war will change - little or a lot - the content of it. Following this theory, there are no timeless entities. Indeed, one must analyse the characteristics of an entity that can be defined as 'timeless', even in Mac Taggart's specific description of the B-series.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Virtue epistemology has emerged as an influential alternative to traditional knowledge theories. It has two main branches: reliabilism, which sees epistemic virtues as cognitive faculties that reliably produce true beliefs (Sosa, 2007), and responsibilism, which prioritizes acquired epistemic habits over innate faculties, considering them "appropriate objects of praise and blame" (Axtell, 1997, p. 26). Virtue epistemology, in either of its classical strands, argues that the epistemic arises from personal virtues. This has been questioned as it understands both cognitive faculties and responsibilist virtues as traits of the individual agent and difficult to apply to collective agents (see Navarro & Pino, 2021). In our presentation, we argue that virtues can be traits of the group, of society, based on networks of trust and collaboration (see Broncano, 2020). Many have developed a reliabilist virtue epistemology grounded not in an individual agent but in a collective agent (see Kellestrup, 2020). However, if these new reliabilist models aim to account for how agents come to know (based on reliable dispositions) in collective terms, the main thesis of our presentation is that this new way of understanding virtue epistemology is insensitive to social structures that generate ignorance and epistemic injustices, such as meritocracy and ableism.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
There have been several attempts to defend the Ethical Narrativity Thesis (ENT), that is, the claim that people ought to develop and live according to a self-narrative because it is essential to living well or flourishing. Existing arguments for the ENT have several weaknesses, some rely on an excessively narrow view of flourishing, one sets the threshold for self-narrative so low that the concept is rendered trivial, others only promote a limited ENT whereby self-narratives enable valuable kinds of emotional experience but don’t influence agency. I put forward a novel argument for the ENT that avoids these weaknesses. I claim that self-narratives provide a powerful and irreplicable means of diachronically stabilising intentions because they are ideally suited to anticipating, constructing, and shaping our perspectives over time. As such, self-narration is a valuable tool for achieving self-governance. My view entails that people who don’t self-narrate are relatively vulnerable to failures of self-governance due to temptation and the cognitive burden of deliberation. Self-governance is a necessary (but insufficient) condition for flourishing so people who self-narrate will, ceteris paribus, flourish more than those who do not.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The human condition is inherently challenging. Our lives are coloured by toil, limitation, pain, illness, impermanence, and death. Added to these obstacles is an apparent lack of moral economy in the universe. These circumstances render us susceptible to mental disturbances such as despair, nihilism, anxiety, and grief. Ancient spiritual traditions aim to provide a bulwark against these afflictions by reframing the human condition in a manner that allows us to face it with equanimity and courage. In the Western context, two traditions have been particularly influential. Christianity teaches that while the human condition is fundamentally bad in several respects (e.g., suffering, sin, death), thanks to God’s grace, the faithful can look forward to an afterlife that is free from the woes of terrestrial existence. Stoicism proceeds by challenging common assumptions about value and well-being; pain, illness, and death are not bad for us because well-being depends solely on virtue. In this paper, I argue that accepting the Stoic account of well-being, which is the core Stoic doctrine, is ultimately a matter of faith, and that we have good reasons to cultivate this faith. I also argue that Stoic faith is more attainable and stable than conventional religious faith.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I develop a two-part theory of truth according to which the truth of a sentence requires more than just the world being as the sentence says it is. Truth requires this kind of correspondence, and also something further - what I call `Steadiness'. My proposal builds on the legacy of Bradwardine, Buridan, and Swyneshed, who proposed two-part accounts of truth. Like many theories of truth, mine is forged in the fires of paradox. In this talk, I will outline how my account of truth works, how it ties into the debates about paradoxes, discuss some of its implications for logic and semantics, and suggest avenues for further development of the proposal.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are widely regarded as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). In response, Widerker (1995), Ginet (1996), and others have advanced the well-known Dilemma Defense: in any FSC, either the agent is not morally responsible, or the agent could have done otherwise. This defense is often thought to depend on a “prior sign”—an indicator of how the agent is likely to act. To address this, Mele and Robb (1998), Hunt (2000), and others have revised FSCs to eliminate the role of such signs. This paper sets that debate aside and argues instead that all standard FSCs face a deeper structural dilemma, one that arises from the very nature of these cases and does not depend on prior signs. As a result, FSCs cannot serve as genuine counterexamples to PAP.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-262
Is surrogacy a form of legitimate work? Or does the nature of pregnancy and parenthood render surrogacy illegitimate? In this presentation I argue that the best strategy in defence of commercial surrogacy—which I call the “surrogacy-as-legitimate-work” strategy—relies on two implicit assumptions and that once we make them explicit, we are forced to see that commercial surrogacy inevitably leads to a conflict of core moral rights. As I hope to show, if commercial surrogacy is a type of work, it is work that cannot simultaneously protect the right of the surrogate mother to opt out and the right of the commissioning couple to exercise ultimate authority over the foetus.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper explores whether, for Hobbes, having power is intrinsically comparative. Is having power always already 'more power' than someone else, so that some people having power means that others lack it? In more contemporary terms, is power 'zero-sum'? Or can many individuals simultaneously have power? I will argue that Hobbes does initially conceive of power as zero-sum, but that he later repudiates this conceptualisation. I'll reconstruct the weaknesses of his early view, and how these are remedied in his later work. I'll then trace the ramifications of this conceptual shift for Hobbes's moral psychology of justice and equity.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-206
In philosophical literature on dementia, a key question is how to determine what is in the best interest of people with dementia. Two opposing views exist: one appeals to a person's former values, while the other suggests that past values matter little, focusing instead on current perspectives. Franklin Hall recently proposed a third alternative: the "revision model”. This model holds that we only consider past values if they have been revised and the person is answerable for why. I make a case for modifying Hall’s answerability requirement. I draw a distinction between a direct answer and a demonstrable answer. I argue that even when the requirements of answerability are not directly met, requirements can still be met indirectly: we may identify answers through epistemic resources and contextual clues available to us. In some cases, where epistemic access is limited and the person cannot offer a direct response, all we have is the absence of evidence that the answerability requirement has been met, not evidence that it has not been met. The upshot is that, in a wider range of cases, people with dementia may still meet the requirements of answerability, or at least, it may remain undetermined whether those requirements are unmet.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
According to Asian nondual traditions, the apparent separation between subject and object is an illusion. If this is true, then how do we understand the nondual experience and even more importantly how do we experience it? I argue that we can distinguish between two types of nonduality: (1) Nonduality by exclusion: An experience in which there is no distinction between subject and object. (2) Nonduality by inclusion: An experience in which subject and object are non-separate, but in which an experiential distinction can still be drawn. While there are certainly many reports of contemplative experiences that involve the former, I am particularly interested in how to experience the latter in everyday life. To explore this and most importantly to experience nonduality directly for ourselves, I will guide the audience through a series of Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments. While conceptualisations of the phenomenology of nonduality may never be entirely adequate, I believe that different accounts can be useful for bringing out different aspects of these experiences. I will hence conclude by outlining five potential accounts: reductive identity (the bundle theory), substance-mode, the paradoxical account, co-constitution and the dialectical account.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
One site of agreement among several proponents and opponents of the knowledge norm of justified belief (KNJ) is that some senses of justification ought to be unified. Consider the deontic sense of justification, whereby one’s belief itself is justified just in case it follows the norm of belief, and the hypological sense of justification, whereby the believer herself is justified in their belief just in case her epistemic performance in so believing is positively evaluable to a sufficient degree. Littlejohn, for instance, leverages the equation of these two senses – i.e., one’s belief is deontically justified if and only if one is hypologically justified in so believing (DHJ) – to undermine non-factive norms of justification. Now, DHJ does not suffice to establish KNJ, but I argue that the most plausible way to do so is by an infallibilist interpretation of DHJ, called DHJ-i: infallible hypological justification just is infallible deontic justification. I also argue that DHJ-i is a more defensible principle than DHJ. Therefore, given that DHJ is independently plausible outside of KNJ’s truth-value, this spells trouble for opponents of KNJ: they must either deny their very position or commit to a problematic denial of this way of unifying justification’s different senses.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Animal ethics is increasingly arguing that moral obligations exist to intervene into ecology to reduce wild animal suffering; this requires control over animal reproduction. This raises serious population ethics concerns that have been ignored by animal ethics. Practical human population ethics has confined itself to comparing reproductive choices that involve a human agent creating one or zero individuals. Because human agents attract reproductive autonomy, obligations to create more or less individuals than would be freely chosen are not considered. However, animal ethics is not constrained by animal autonomy, or values given to biodiversity, species membership and ecological roles as animal ethics has converged to reject their import. Sustainability is also dismissed as ultimately constraining our relationship to animals and ecology; technological innovation is always possible. The interspecies population ethics avaliable suggests repugnant conclusions are avoided by a hierarchy of moral standing; no matter how big the animal population, a human population remains preferable. I show that animal ethics has harboured implicit support for such a hierarchy from Mill to Regan. I conclude that animal ethics forced to confront population ethics either degrades into a weak anti-cruelty framework or supports eugenics that phases out all non-human animal life.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Vandana Shiva is an ecological thinker and food justice activist renowned for her incisive critiques of industrial agriculture. Shiva’s vision of the appropriate human-nature relation and the good life, I argue, is often expressed via an informal use of virtue language. Although her work makes no direct reference to virtue ethics, it is deeply suffused with essential components of virtuous appraisal. Shiva’s holistic understanding of ecology and the role of smallholder farmers valorises particular characteristics, behaviours and actions that are specific to the practice of farming. Across her body of work, Shiva provides a thick account of virtuous behaviours and dispositions to realise in the agricultural context. In this talk, I make explicit the agrarian virtue ethics that is arguably implicit in Shiva’s work. I explore particular virtues I deem to best capture her implicit ontology of engaging in a virtuous life.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
According to perdurantism, the survival relation obtains between two person-stages just in case they are both temporal parts of the same person. According to a degree-based view of survival, the survival relation admits of degrees. This paper considers three ways in which perdurantists can accommodate a degree-based view of survival: they could introduce gradations to the property of being a person-stage (person-stage approach), the parthood relation between person-stages and persons (mereological approach), or the connection relation between person-stages in a person (topological approach). A formal mereological framework is formulated for representing the perdurantist view of survival, and it is shown that all three approaches can be implemented in independently motivated extensions of the framework. It is argued that of the three approaches, the topological approach offers the greatest flexibility when it comes to accounting for non-symmetric instances of survival and allows perdurantism to share the advantages of exdurantism over endurantism.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Free will skepticism is a position that either doubts or explicitly denies the existence of free will. In contrast, some proponents of free will—particularly compatibilists—affirm its existence by appealing to the concept of "agency." They argue that if individuals act with agency, then, even if determinism is true and their actions lack alternative possibilities or sourcehood, they still possess the freedom necessary for moral responsibility.
However, free will skepticism does not necessarily focus on agency. If a form of free will skepticism can meet the compatibilist criteria for agency while still remaining valid, it would present a significant philosophical challenge. In this presentation, I will examine Galen Strawson’s 'Basic Argument' as an example of free will skepticism and consider the question: "Is free will skepticism incompatible with agency?" I will explore how agency can be satisfied within free will skepticism and whether, despite this, it can still raise fundamental doubts about our freedom and moral responsibility. Such an inquiry, I believe, can help avoid the issue of talking past one another in free will debates, fostering a more productive discussion.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
Some proponents of multiple realization attempt to eat their realized cake while having their reduction, too. The constrained identity account of multiple realization offered by Polger and Shapiro (2016) is such an attempt, and in this paper I argue that it, and attempts like it, will lead to a complex dilemma for proponents of hybrid identity/realization accounts. Either they adhere to Kim’s (1992) principle of the causal individuation of kinds, in which case they must deal with Kim’s own reductionist dilemma for multiple realization, or they follow Polger and Shapiro (2016) in weakening Kim’s principle to the causally-relevant individuation of kinds. However, this leads to a relativisation of kinds to human interests, and thus to a pragmatist approach to science. Since multiple realizationists tend to be realists (after all, they think one set of entities at a basic level of reality makes another set of entities real), this is a problem for them. After diagnosing the problem they face, I offer them only unpalatable solutions: accept one or other fork of the dilemma and agree with Kim’s extreme reductivism or accept a pragmatism which admits only a watery realism.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
The aim of this paper is to present and defend a pragmatist interpretation of John Stuart Mill’s arguments defending freedom of expression. By drawing a comparison between Mill’s arguments in On Liberty and the work of Charles Peirce, this paper argues that Mill’s fundamental commitment to epistemic fallibilism as a basis for supporting freedom of expression situates him more closely to the pragmatist tradition of collaborative inquiry than the liberal notion of a clash of competing perspectives. This reading of Mill provides a more precise theoretical groundwork for further re-examination of the limits of free speech without necessary reference to the Mill’s utilitarian harm principle, with the right to voice one’s opinion contingent upon said opinion’s pragmatic contribution to collaborative inquiry in the collective pursuit of truth. His arguments provide further reasons to question liberal ideas of static preferences, suggesting that freedom of opinion entails being receptive to the experience of genuinely felt doubt as a basis for remaining open to revising our personal commitments and opinions.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Spinoza emphasizes the value of intuition, the third kind of knowledge, which he associates with the greatest human joy (E5p32=Ethics, Part 5, Proposition 32). He writes little, however, about how we might come to attain intuitive knowledge. The clearest suggestion is that such knowledge somehow arises from a different, less valuable sort of knowledge, reason (E5p28), but it is difficult to see how it might do so. After all, for Spinoza, it appears that (1) reason consists in common notions (E2p40s2), which are ideas of what is common to things (E2p38C); (2) intuition is knowledge of the essence of things (E2p40s2); and (3) what is common to things does not constitute the essence of anything (E2p37). In this essay, I try to make a little headway against this problem. I argue, first, against (1), that the Ethics may suggest that there are other ideas that are also ideas of reason but that are not common notions; second, that there is good reason to think that such ideas include ideas of laws of nature; and third, mitigating the problem that (3) presents, that laws of nature do, for Spinoza, constitute the essence of things.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Recent debates on the ethical use of AI in medicine have gradually shifted from asking whether explainability as an epistemic property matters morally in terms of adopting a medical AI that cannot be fully understood by humans to determining how much explainability is required across different clinical contexts. This shift recognises that explainability is a matter of degree, and that the ethical adoption of medical technologies does not always require a full understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Following this view, some suggest that the level of explainability required should be determined by how a medical AI system would affect a person’s life — the greater the irreversibility, invasiveness, or risk of an intervention, the higher the demand for explainability.
This paper challenges that position. Using recent research on sepsis scoring systems and their use in the clinical context as a case study, I argue that the level of explainability required for adopting a diagnostic tool do not track these clinical factors. Instead, the degree of explainability ethically required should depend on the epistemic objectives the tool is designed to fulfil. In some contexts, a high level of explainability may be essential even when clinical risks are low.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The doctrine of Dependent Origination is a view of a great Philosopher Buddha. Seeing Dependent Origination is seeing the truth of the Selflessness of dharmas (Emptiness of dharmas). This is a unique view of the history of Philosophy. The doctrine of No-self is a feature of Buddhist teachings, which is entirely different from all philosophies and beliefs of the world. Nagarjuna appeared several centuries after the Buddha and followed the thought of Dependent Origination to establish the Madhyamika (Sunyata) school or Middle Way. Although many centuries have passed, Nagarjuna’s doctrine of emptiness is still valid for breaking all attachments. This empty foundation can be seen as the pinnacle of wisdom that has brought Buddhism above all other doctrines. Nagarjuna Philosophy of Logic of Emptiness on Logic Two truths and Logic of Non-Dualism, or Logic of Eight Negations. The Two Truths logic clearly explains the existence of emptiness as well as its practicality. The logic of Non-Dualism (Eight negations) smashes all thoughts of attachment to worldly phenomena as well as creative ideas of some schools.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Many mereologists think Weak Supplementation is analytic (Simons, 1987; Effingham & Robson, 2007; Varzi, 2008), while its opponents generally rely on denying Extensionality. Weaker alternatives like Strong Company have been proposed, but its models seemed physically implausible without time travel (Simons, 1987; Cotnoir & Varzi, 2021). If charge and mass are intrinsic properties of fundamental particles, however (Lewis, 1991; Bird, 2007), then an Extensionality-preserving physical model of Strong Company exists.
The idea is that calculating mass and charge for isolated fundamental particles requires accounting for self-interactions via perturbative expansions, represented as Feynman diagrams of increasing order. If mass and charge are intrinsic, then these self-interactions must be parts of the particle propagator. Indeed the perturbative expansion generates a weak partial order with Reflexivity, Anti-Symmetry, and Transitivity. If the bare propagator is treated as a top, then the poset forms a join semi-lattice interpretable as parthood. As the sequence is infinite every perturbation order will occur, there are no disjoint parts, so the strongest possible decomposition axiom is Strong Company. Yet two Feynman diagrams which allow the same perturbations are topologically identical, so the model satisfies Extensionality. The intrinsic properties of fundamental particles demotivate the analyticity of Weak Supplementation.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Parmenides insisted that we could not even think of non-being (though apparently we could say that)! At least since then there have been (and still are ) two traditions, one maintaining that about nothing we could speak positively, saying for example that it has features, or, significantly for the Abrahamic religions, that 'from it' everything was created, and the other that all true sentences in which 'nothing' figures as subject or topic have the logical form of negative sentences denying claims about what there is or could be. This paper traces part of the history of the debate focusing first on Fridugisus of Tours and Anselm of Canterbury as representatives of the two traditions and taking up a later medieval debate involving Walter Burley and William Ockham about the coherence of reference to impossibilia. At stake are issues about criteria of ontological commitment, the relation between being and thinkability and (even) the distinction between nothing and God!
Doomsday is the last moment in time. Nothing comes after. In the recent literature on temporal metaphysics, several theories have been challenged by arguments invoking doomsday. In this talk I focus on the papers of Loss (2019), Andreoletti (2022), and Bigg and Miller (2024). A shared premise in these arguments is that it would be a problem or drawback for a theory of time, if it failed to allow for moments of undetermineddoomsday. In this scenario, time ends, despite it not being determined to by the laws plus the state of the world. Each of these authors argues that this scenario is at least possible, so we should expect a good theory of time to make room for it. In this talk, I argue against this point. In general, if a theory of time is incompatible with undetermined doomsday, then that is merely an interesting but neutral consequence of that theory. More broadly, we can expect various theories of time to be incompatible with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including being incompatible with any doomsday at all. I argue that this is not a prima facie problematic stance to adopt.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-262
I have argued that uncertainty assessment of climate model predictions should typically be of the extent to which they are epistemically possible and that, in some cases where they are epistemically possible, the possibilities should further be ranked as to how remote they are. I have also argued that, in the climate science context, an epistemic possibility should be taken to be a possibility that is not recognised to be excluded by what is known and is compatible with knowledge that approximates the basic way things are in the domain the possibility is about. In the present paper, I explain my position on assessing uncertainty in climate science and consider and respond to two challenges to its application, specifically, those of how to operationalise my notion of epistemic possibility and how to classify possibilities that fall short of being epistemically possible. I illustrate my view and responses in the case of the assessment of the possibility of marine ice-cliff instability induced sea-level rise.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In recent years, several philosophers have noted, and tried to resolve, a seemingly deep tension between Rawls’s accounts of inter- and intragenerational justice; namely, that the just savings principle seems to require the very sort of inequalities that the difference principle forbids. In this talk, I do three things. First, I reframe and strengthen the tension by showing that it is ostensibly deeper than most have conceived of it. Most fundamentally, the just savings principle seemingly violates not only the difference principle but also a condition of reciprocity that Rawls suggests the parties in the original position would require any principle of justice to satisfy. Second, I employ this reframing to expose the flaws in several of the leading solutions to the tension to date. And third, I offer a new solution that goes beyond Rawls’s view—a version of the just savings principle I call the Compensated Savings Principle. This principle both exemplifies reciprocity and, unlike its main rival, also satisfies a new adequacy condition I propose for the savings principle. According to this Imperative to Expedite Justice, the savings principle must give a certain priority to establishing the material conditions needed for just institutions sooner rather than later.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Pain asymbolia is a rare condition in which patients report the experience of pain but do not exhibit characteristic motivational/behavioral and emotional responses to a noxious stimulus. Such cases pose a challenge to a characterisation of pain derived from typical episodes in which pain sensation is intimately associated with aversive response and negatively-valenced affect. Pain asymbolia is thus test case for neuroscientific and philosophical theories of the nature of pain experience. Those theories can be described as disconnection, depersonalisation and eliminativist (pain asymbolia is not real pain) accounts. None entirely preserve the phenomena, satisfactorily account for the role of neural correlates.
We argue that pain asymbolia represents a failure of emotional transcription of a nociceptive signal. This explanation depends on the idea that the insula cortex anchors distributed processing that subtends a form of interoceptive active inference. As well as explaining pain asymbolia this account also explains the enigmatic and cognitively ubiquitous role of insula processing. We discuss a recent case in which the patient was subject to a full battery of modern investigative techniques. This is helpful since philosophical discussion often relies on classic neuropsychological reports, especially the original 1931 study.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Impurists about knowledge believe practical factors and considerations about what might be rational for an agent to choose might impose constraints on the scope of what she might know. I shall argue that the most familiar and influential impurist views are mistaken. These impurist views must be mistaken because they are incompatible with something I've dubbed "epistemic encroachment". Epistemic encroachment occurs when considerations about what we know impose constraints on what might rationally be chosen. Epistemic encroachment makes sense of some seemingly robust but puzzling intuitions about choice that, I shall argue, our impurists about knowledge cannot make sense of given their distinctive views about the relationships between belief, credence, and choice.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Existing conceptions of sport’s role in education have focused on the development of specific moral values or contextualising sports culture through philosophical discussion. While worthy and important goals, they retain the subservience of the physical to the mental, leading to the inherent tension between the instinctual and rational capacities of a moral agent. By treating sport similarly to artistic practice, we can bring the rational and emotional aspects of the soul together in an embodied context. Through this, not only is the moral agent free to make choices outside of the dictates of moral law or instinct, but they reach a state of contemplation of what it means to be moral through beauty.
By then linking this harmonisation with meditative practices, as espoused by Yuasa Yasuo and the idea of the unity of mind and body as something to be cultivated rather than as innate fact of human experience, I contend that a modern physical education program must centre this idea for it to offer a unique perspective on moral education in modern education systems. Finally, I will offer suggestions as to how this may look in a practical sense, and how this idea of harmonisation may look in practice.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Recent years have seen growing interest in applying relevant logics to formal epistemology. These logics, with their relational semantics, offer a natural framework for modelling agents with incomplete or inconsistent information, while avoiding problematic classical results such as paradoxes of material implication. When epistemic operators are added to relevant logics, we obtain systems where agents need not possess the full rational powers assumed in classical epistemic logic—for instance, agents may not know all valid formulas. However, even these systems retain a strong idealization: agents remain closed under relevant logical consequence, knowing all relevant consequences of their knowledge. This talk proposes an alternative approach: a relevant epistemic logic that imposes only a weak, minimal rationality constraint to agents. In this system, agents’ knowledge is not closed under all relevant consequences, thereby allowing for failures of deductive reasoning even within the framework of relevant logic. The aim is to better capture the topicality constraints and cognitive limitations that real agents face. I will outline the formal properties of this system and discuss its philosophical implications for the study of knowledge and rationality.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
This paper explores a possible explanation for why we care about truth. As human beings, we are naturally inclined to seek truth over falsehoods. Normatively, we are also expected to believe and assert truths rather than lies. But why is truth so important to us? One common view holds that truth has instrumental value—it helps us achieve our goals. Another view sees truth as intrinsically valuable, valuable in itself. However, Wrenn (2010, 2017, 2023) argues that both views fall short. He denies that truth itself has value but claims that caring about truth is a moral virtue; we morally ought to seek it. Following Wrenn’s strategy, I will also reject the idea that truth itself has value. Instead, I focus on the process of acquiring truth. I propose that acquiring truth is a kind of achievement, and achievement is intrinsically valuable. The pursuit of truth involves overcoming challenges and exercising our will, a core human character. Thus, the value lies not in truth itself, but in the act of seeking it. By emphasizing the value of achievement, we can explain why we ought to care about truth without assuming that truth is valuable in itself.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-262
As I and many others have argued, philosophy in community projects provide powerful, immersive introductions to philosophical thinking for participants. Embedded in the philosophy for children pedagogy of community of inquiry, my practice has focused on activity-based stimulus that get young people to think together about questions and issues that matter to them. In the last 12 months my focus has been on ‘youth at risk’, such as young people who are in detention, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, or those who attend community colleges because traditional education systems have failed them.
I have learnt two things in the last year. First, I am no longer doing communities of inquiry (CoI’s), and secondly, I don’t think it matters. Integral to the success of CoI’s is the building of a community over time. But my work is with transient participants, who may or may not attend from session to session, so there is often no time, no continuity that is needed, to build a community. My question today is: Is engaging in philosophical inquiry – evaluating arguments, reasoning, questioning, etc., – enough, or is the building of a thinking community essential to the pedagogy?
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-206
In this paper I provide a novel argument against the Value-free Ideal (VFI) and explore some of its implications. I begin by arguing that no existing critique of the VFI targets the relations of inductive support between evidence and hypotheses (relations of confirmation). In fact, many critics of the VFI, like Heather Douglas, explicitly state that relations of confirmation remain value-free (Douglas, 2000, p. 656). However, I argue that confirmation is value-laden. After briefly surveying different inductive logics, I claim that the best prospects for a value-free account of confirmation rely on the probability calculus. For these accounts to be value-free, two conditions must be met: (1) probabilities must themselves be value-free, and (2) the choice of confirmation function (a function of probabilities) must also be value-free. Condition (1) fails because all interpretations of probability face the reference class problem (Hájek, 2007), and choosing a reference class requires non-epistemic value judgements. Condition (2) also fails, since the choice of confirmation function is underdetermined by evidence, theory, and epistemic values, requiring further non-epistemic value judgements. Hence, confirmation is value-laden. I conclude by exploring the implications of this conclusion for contemporary defences of the VFI (e.g. Menon and Stegenga, 2023).
REFERENCES
Douglas, H. (2000). Inductive Risk and Values in Science. Philosophy of Science, 67(4):559–579. Hájek, A. (2007). The reference class problem is your problem too. Synthese, 156(3):563–585. Menon, T. and Stegenga, J. (2023). Sisyphean science: why value freedom is worth pursuing. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 13(4):48.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper seeks to relate the notions of a division of labour, division of knowledge (as in standpoint epistemology), and division of authority (as in a separation of powers) to the tasks of social philosophy. Anybody who works in ethical or political theory or similar will be conscious of these concepts and will have some use for them. But because their significance is often forgotten at crucial junctures, I think it will be worth our while to discuss just how central they are, and how an awareness of them must shape social philosophy from the very beginning and at almost every step of the way after that. This in particular has consequences for those who try to do social philosophy from ‘the point of view of the universe’ or who advocate for positive duties owed by every human to every other human.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper challenges the widespread interpretation under which Spinoza understands the modes of God as propria. This interpretation is based on three principal doctrines:(i) Spinoza’s familiarity with the Scholastic tradition which defines propria as God’s necessary but non-essential properties; (ii) Spinoza’s claim that each mode necessarily follows from the essence of God; and (iii) Spinoza’s two-category ontology (substance and modes). I argue that the distinction between God’s modes and propria is compatible with (i)-(iii) because, whereas modes are intrinsic denominations of the only substance (properties that are predicated of a thing in virtue of something inherent to that thing), propria are its extrinsic denominations. First, I argue that for Late Scholastics, such as Suárez, the propria of God (such as eternity and infinity) are distinguished from God by reason and hence extrinsic denominations. Second, I show that Spinoza’s understanding of propria is consistent with Suárez’s characterisation. I contrast this with Spinoza’s view of modes as inherent properties and distinguished from God by a modal distinction. Third, I contend that by rendering propria as extrinsic denominations, my interpretation not only accommodates (i)-(iii) but also avoids the challenge of explaining how finite, durational things can follow from an eternal and infinite substance.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
A speaker often uses a word to communicate what linguists call an “ad hoc concept” – an occasion-specific meaning – that is different from the word’s stable encoded meaning, and the hearer can usually construct the intended ad hoc concept through pragmatic inference. Appreciating this linguistic insight can shed significant light on a wide range of issues in both philosophical and public discourse. In this talk, I explore how the notion of ad hoc concepts can provide a framework for theorising the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms underpinning characteristic instances of verbal disputes. Crucially, I distinguish between two kinds of communicative failures that frequently occur in verbal disputes – “failures to recognise” and “failures to adopt”. I will analyse cognitive-linguistic factors driving these failures and draw implications with respect to verbal disputes in both public discourse and philosophy.
