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Sunday, July 5
 

10:00am AEST

2025 WINTER SCHOOL
Sunday July 5, 2026 10:00am - 3:00pm AEST
Abel Smith Lecture Theatre @ St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
The AAP Winter school is an opportunity for students of philosophy, including high school students, to hear from professional philosophers and those working in areas of philosophical interest including critical thinking, writing, and public reasoning.  Workshops are interactive and informative and there is no cost to attend. Organised by the AAP Undergraduate Committee, the Philosophy...
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Sunday July 5, 2026 10:00am - 3:00pm AEST
Abel Smith Lecture Theatre
  WINTER SCHOOL

2:30pm AEST

Check-in Desk Day 1
Sunday July 5, 2026 2:30pm - 6:00pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Conference Check-in desk open.
Sunday July 5, 2026 2:30pm - 6:00pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium

4:00pm AEST

Conference Welcome
Sunday July 5, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Welcome to the 2025 AAP Conference and Presentation of AAP Prize winners - Annette Baier Prize and Innovation in Inclusive Curricula Prize.
Speakers
avatar for Tracy Bowell

Tracy Bowell

University of Waikato
AAP Chief Executive Officer
 
Sunday July 5, 2026 4:00pm - 4:30pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

4:30pm AEST

Not Knowing Not Knowing
Sunday July 5, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Gettierism (as I call it) has been part of epistemology since 1963 – often actively investigated and refined, at times ignored, yet always agreed to be correct in its most basic claim. Which claim is that? Gettierists take for granted that Edmund Gettier disproved knowledge’s definability as an epistemically well-justified true belief. He did so with two tales, each about an epistemic agent...
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Sunday July 5, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

6:00pm AEST

Opening Reception
Sunday July 5, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Opening Reception for all attendees following the Presidential Address.

aap.org.au/Social-Events-2025



Sunday July 5, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  SOCIAL EVENTS
 
Monday, July 6
 

8:30am AEST

Check-in Desk Day 2
Monday July 6, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Check-in Desk open.
Monday July 6, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium

9:00am AEST

Metaphysical Identity: Time for an Australian Philosophy?
Monday July 6, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Colonialism is a thousand years old, starting from the Crusades (1100-1300) when Christian Europe tried to take the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Despite failing those wars, European colonialism came to dominate other countries further afield and has continued in different forms to the present day.The ancient Aboriginal system came from a long-term experiment in human order making. The activity of...
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Monday July 6, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

10:30am AEST

Morning Break
Monday July 6, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Morning Break
Monday July 6, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

11:00am AEST

Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy in Focus
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The aim of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is to discover the first principles of human knowledge, that is, what must be known before anything else can be known. If we are to understand this work, it is important to understand the methodology he employs. Descartes does not reveal the method utilized in the Meditations in this work, nor in any of his other books.It is only in the...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  ASEMP, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

Bullshit Universities: The Future of Automated Education
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The advent of ChatGPT, and the subsequent rapid improvement in the performance of what has become known as Generative AI, has led to many pundits declaring that AI will revolutionize education, as well as work, in the future. In this paper, we argue that enthusiasm for the use of AI in tertiary education is misplaced. A proper understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI suggests that it would...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

11:00am AEST

When Axiomatics is Preferable to Semantics
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Philosophical logicians often develop a language and a semantics to represent and study a body of philosophically interesting sentences whose truth conditions are ontologically puzzling. Examples include: possible world semantics, situation semantics, impossible world semantics, Routley star semantics, possibility semantics, etc. The philosophical action takes place in the semantics, which...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

11:00am AEST

Emptying the Void
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
What is empty space? Philosophers in the tradition stemming from Newton, through say Bertrand Russell down to, say, David Lewis, have thought of empty space as a manifold of things called points, and a region of space as empty if no material thing is located at any of the points in that region. These points possess locations and stand in spatial relations to one another; that is, they are things...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206
  Metaphysics

11:00am AEST

Can LLMs Contribute to Philosophical Progress?
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Does philosophy make progress? Although it may seem obvious that it does, there are sceptics—both within the discipline and beyond it—who question this. In response to such doubts, Stoljar (2017) argues that we are entitled to a “reasonable optimism” about philosophy’s capacity to advance. Stoljar notes that there are recurring patterns or types of philosophical problems that we have...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Other

11:00am AEST

Beyond Biology
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper interrogates the intricate distinction between human beings and persons by re-evaluating John Locke’s framework of personal identity. Whereas human beings are defined by biological continuity, persons, according to Locke, are constituted by psychological continuity—principally the continuity of memory and self-awareness. Locke’s theory posits that a person remains identical over...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Mind

11:00am AEST

The Stance-Dependence of Arguments for Scientific Realism
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The idea that scientific realism and anti-realism are, or are closely related to, epistemic stances (clusters of values, attitudes, goals and commitments), has grown in popularity following the work of van Fraassen, Chakravartty and others. Yet the dream of discovering a decisive stance-independent argument for scientific realism as a thesis – an argument that is, or should be, rationally...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Philosophy of Science, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

The Exclusionary Force of Authoritative Commands
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
A (legitimate) authoritative command provides its subject with a reason for action. Many also think it provides its subject with a peremptory reason to refrain from acting for certain kinds of countervailing reasons. When a father tells his daughter to go to bed, the consideration that she “doesn’t feel like it” is not only insufficiently weighty to challenge her father’s command, but is...
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Speakers
avatar for Corey McCabe

Corey McCabe

Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist, Australian National University
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

11:00am AEST

Expanding Norms of Epistemic Deference in Standpoint Epistemology
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
Epistemic deference (ED) is the practical and rational appeal to another agent as an epistemic authority, whose authority stems from pre-established legitimate expertise, experience, access to relevant evidence, and dependable systems of knowledge. However, within standpoint epistemology, there is a pushback against this norm. Olufemi Taiwo voices this resistance.  In this paper, I critically...
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Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262
  Social Epistemology

12:00pm AEST

AI Agents, Responsibility, and Explanability
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There has been a recent proliferation of “AI Agents”: systems or programs that can operate in an increasingly autonomous manner. These systems raise an important question: do improvements in the capabilities of autonomous systems change the requirements for how we hold such systems – or their operators or designers – responsible for their outputs? Responsibility can be fruitfully connected...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

12:00pm AEST

Is Functionalism Inconsistent?
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Can a theorem of pure mathematics definitively refute a philosophical view? According to one popular argument, the answer is yes. The theorem in question comes from model theory, and the philosophical view is functionalism: one of themost popular and well-studied views in the philosophy of mind. According to this argument, functionalism is logically inconsistent, and Beth’s definability theorem...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

In Defence of Classical Phenomenology
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The field of phenomenology is still undergoing healthy development over a hundred years since Edmund Husserl published Ideas. In this paper I explore how the emerging field of critical phenomenology both separates itself from and actively integrates classical phenomenological concepts. More specifically, I analyse how Husserl’s method lingers in contemporary critical approaches. Original...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  History of Philosophy, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Making Sense of Temporary Memberlessness
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Social metaphysicians have largely neglected to address what happens when a group loses all of its members. While Hanschmann (2023) argues that social groups can never be memberless, I argue that social entities like clubs, bands and sports teams can be temporarily memberless. Epstein (2015) points out that we have good reasons to accept that entities like the U.S. Supreme Court may persist, in...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Metaphysics

12:00pm AEST

Philosophy for Middle Management: A Field Guide for Field Philosophy
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This is a story of opportunities for field philosophy. Not a paper in the standard sense, more a travelogue of places that philosophers could venture and lend a hand.Middle managers in the public sector face more philosophical challenges than you might realise. They interface between abstract policy and tangible implementation plans, they decide how the state meets the street, they filter and...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

12:00pm AEST

Telling Our Dreams
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The concept of narrative is widespread in the literature on dreams, spanning the humanities, psychology, and cognitive science. Yet, this term and its associated conceptual aspects often remain undefined and insufficiently investigated. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literature theory, and semiotics, there has been...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Mind

12:00pm AEST

Demeriting Labels and the Reproduction of Social Hierarchy
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In this paper, I argue that there is a general class of label that purports to track problematic behaviours, beliefs, motives, or vices. I call these demeriting labels. Some examples are “liar”, “racist”, “tattletale”, “creep”, “virtue signaller”, “snowflake”, and “slob”. When someone is labelled, lead to social sanctions, tarnish their character, and block them from...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Knowing Others Through Virtual Embodiment
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
What, if anything, can we come to know about other people through virtual embodiment? Critics of virtual reality (VR) which virtually embodies users as marginalised persons argue such experiences inevitably misrepresent marginalised lives, encourage epistemic overconfidence in users, and reduce complex social identities to decontextualised simulations. While these concerns are valid, I argue that...
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Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Social Epistemology

1:00pm AEST

Lunch
Monday July 6, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Lunch Break

Monday July 6, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

2:00pm AEST

Nurturing Critical Thinking and Ethics
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:25pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The Centre for Critical Thinking and Ethics, Newington College has spearheaded a K-12 strategic approach to sharpening student’s critical thinking skills. Drawing from the Philosophy in Schools / P4C / and Teaching for Thinking pedagogical approaches, our initiative is spelled out in some detail in Jensen et al (2024). Due to (i) the detached nature of our sharable resources (ii) our growing...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:25pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

2:00pm AEST

Beyond Promises, Before Ethical Life
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper seeks to develop an account of what it means to think ethically and to therefore be able to criticise certain forms of life, practices, and institutional arrangements by taking the particular case of the promissory relations undergirding modern social and economic relations as a privileged case. By drawing on the Humean problematic of the “is-ought” and Anscombe’s denunciation of...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Continental Philosophy, Hybrid

2:00pm AEST

Reason-Responsiveness Theories Cannot Survive the Attack of Situationism
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Reason-Responsiveness Theories of Moral Responsibility (RRT) posits that the control necessary for moral responsibility depends on an agent's sensitivity to reasons. However, Situationist experiments present evidence that situational factors, rather than reasons, predominantly shape behavior. This paper contends that RRT cannot adequately address these challenges. After critiquing two common yet...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

2:00pm AEST

The Krohn-Rhodes Theorem for the Mathematically Apathetic Philosopher
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The Krohn-Rhodes theorem, the cornerstone of algebraic automata theory, has fallen into relative obscurity. That's not a huge surprise:  most presentations of the theorem are mathematically forbidding, the payoff is not obvious,  and relatively few philosophers (or mathematicians, for that matter)  care about semigroup theory. However, several recent articles have suggested that the...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Impossible Worlds and What They Cannot Explain
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Recently, a group of philosophers, often dubbed 'impossible-worldists' have embraced impossible-worldism—a view that accepts impossible worlds into their ontological category. According to impossible-worldists, by accepting impossible worlds, many hyperintensional phenomena which possible world frameworks cannot address can be accounted for. For example, it is claimed that impossible worlds can...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Metaphysics

2:00pm AEST

The Brain Does Not Give Rise to Consciousness
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
One of the great mysteries that characterizes our time is the hard problem of consciousness. How is it that physical things like brains give rise to subjective experience? The problem continues to remain stubbornly unresolved despite decades of intense research, and this has motivated some of us to turn a critical eye back on the assumptions embedded within the question itself. One worry is that...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Mind

2:00pm AEST

Distributing the Costs and Benefits of Children
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Some ‘responsibility-sensitive' theorists of justice have argued that because parents are responsible for the existence of children, only they are responsible for the costs of those children. Others have argued that because children are akin to public goods, the costs of children should be socialised between parents and non-parents.I argue that both analyses are incomplete.To focus only on costs...
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Speakers
avatar for Alexander Forbes

Alexander Forbes

Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist, Monash University
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Human-in-the-feedback-loop
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
Generative AI language models are increasingly being positioned as epistemic tools, used to aid enquiry and generally help us find things out. However, they suffer from certain flaws which both limit their usefulness as epistemic tools and risk causing epistemic harm. While AI bias and hallucinations have been written about as being epistemically harmful, an underexplored trait is that of...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Social Epistemology

2:30pm AEST

The Role of Philosophers in the Age of AI
Monday July 6, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Philosophers have long shaped foundational thinking, public discourse, and education. But the past three decades have seen seismic shifts in how we teach and learn—through digital platforms, short-form content, and increasingly personalized experiences. Now, AI presents both a profound challenge and a powerful opportunity. Tools like large language models simulate reasoning but lack true...
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Monday July 6, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

3:00pm AEST

Dialogue, Justice, and the Classroom
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:25pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In an age dominated by algorithms, disinformation, and increasing political polarisation, the role of the classroom in fostering democratic habits of thought is more critical than ever. Drawing on Connell’s work and a critical feminist lens, this presentation argues that without a conscious effort to challenge patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalist structures, schools risk reproducing...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:25pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

3:00pm AEST

Kant and the Radical Point of Analogy
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper develops a conceptualisation of analogy in the history of philosophical methodology as a pharmakon – a force that is both destructive and creative (Derrida, 2004, pp. 75-76). In so doing, it examines an exemplar of analogical methodology by interrogating the potentiality of the radical imagination in the analogical thinking of Immanuel Kant. By focussing on Kant, I am attempting to...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Continental Philosophy, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

The Zhuangzi's Political Methods and the Wisdom of Crowds
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Daoist political discourse offers a tantalising vision of leaders who are somehow effective without being oppressive. But is there any way for it to work in practice? Inspired by the lesser-known outer and miscellaneous chapters of the Zhuangzi, I argue that a strand of Daoist political thought prefigured some aspects of what we now call the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon, including the...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Eastern philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Caring for Country... With Robots?
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Agricultural robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly promoted for their environmental virtues. In Australia, the idea that agriculture needs to be less environmentally destructive and attend to ongoing colonial harms, is increasingly expressed in terms of ‘caring for Country’. Although this concept draws on Indigenous ideas of kinship, it is being adopted by white...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

3:00pm AEST

SAM Space: A Coordinate Geometry for Logic
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Spatial reasoning is already used in logic, from intuitive visual aids like Venn diagrams, to formal structures such as networks, lattices, and trees.SAM Space proposes a new system: an analytic geometry for logic. Just as Cartesian coordinates allow algebraic equations to be rendered as points, planes, functions and vectors, SAM Space seeks to do the same for logical and philosophical...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Symbolic Forms in Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper articulates some points of contact between Ernst Cassirer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by analysing the influence of Cassirer’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. There are two concepts developed in Cassirer’s late philosophy of culture, that are of particular importance for understanding its influence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought –...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  History of Philosophy, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

Naturalizing the Philosophy of Time with the Help of Cognitive Science
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I begin by asking what naturalising the philosophy of time should look like. I develop an account of it, drawing on work by Steven French and Alvin Goldman, whereby the philosophy of time needs to be continuous with scientific findings about the nature of time and about the human cognitive apparatus. I develop an argument against relying on intuitions in the philosophy of time, as these can be...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Metaphysics

3:00pm AEST

De Re Reference and Perceptual Belief
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Prima facie, perception makes us directly aware of particular objects and property-instances, and enables us to make knowledgeable de re reference to them. Call this the strong referential character of experience. Explaining strong referential character of experience is a desideratum for all theories of perception, and some naive realists argue that they give the best explanation of the strong...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Mind

3:00pm AEST

Kantian Provisional Right in the Anthropocene
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that there is only one innate right: the right to be free from determination by another’s will. There and in his late political essays, Kant argues that the fact that human beings reside on the watery spherical surface of the earth (globus terraqueus) provides a rare instance of material fact conditioning right. As Jakob Huber has recently argued, innate...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Empathy Machines
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
Can virtual reality help us to “walk in the shoes” of other people? Optimists claim that VR is the “ultimate empathy machine”, a way for those who have never been to war, or lived in solitary confinement, to know what it is like to have these experiences from the comfort of their living room. Pessimists hold that it is absurd and dangerous to think that VR could be a way of acquiring this...
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Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Social Epistemology

4:00pm AEST

Afternoon Break
Monday July 6, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Monday July 6, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

4:30pm AEST

What it Takes to Become a 'Thinking School'?
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Park Ridge State High School has embarked on a journey to become a centre of excellence in the teaching and learning of critical thinking. Teaming up with the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, a project that blends insights from Philosophy and Education to provide a unique, pedagogical approach to teaching critical thinking in the classroom.Park Ridge SHS teachers are rethinking...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 4:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

4:30pm AEST

Bad Food and Immoral Tastes
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Why wouldn’t you eat a person? One simple answer for many of us is that cannibalism is morally wrong. Another, perhaps more honest answer, is that it would be gross. In this paper, I show how this disgust response can be rationally related to moral judgements and evaluation. Although disgust and moral judgement are clearly correlated, most modern handlings of disgust treat the truth (or some...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

4:30pm AEST

What Does Optimism about Human-AI Friendship Entail
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There are multiple vectors along which one can be more or less pessimistic about the prospects for human-AI friendship. I could be optimistic about the purely technological aspects of AI friends, believing that they will soon be able to do some non-trivial percentage of the things the AI companies claim they can already do. I could be optimistic about the affordances of these AI friends for human...
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Speakers
avatar for Nick Munn

Nick Munn

Conference Organiser, University of Waikato
2025 Conference Organiser.

I was born and raised in Northland, New Zealand, outside of Whangārei.
My undergraduate education at the University of Otago resulted in an LLB and a BA(Hons) in Political Science and Philosophy. 
I then moved to Melbourne, Australia, where I completed... Read More →
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-206
  Ethics

4:30pm AEST

Reasoning, Normativity and Logical Pluralism
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Some norms of reasoning tell us certain inferences are forbidden – for example, Bumbling Bruce goes wrong in reasoning to the conclusion that 𝑝 when his sole reasons are that he accepts 𝑝 → 𝑞 and 𝑞. Some tell us that certain inferences are mandatory – for example, Stunned Sharon goes wrong when she remains in suspension about 𝑞 when she is fully aware that 𝑝 and 𝑝 →...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

4:30pm AEST

Philosophy Moves: Cultivating Move-Mindedness
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
After years of reading philosophy, one is likely to pick up on several of the same or similar ‘moves’ made in distinct domains. Familiarity with the tropes of philosophy brings about an awareness of notable dialectical structures of which one can ‘copy-paste’ the form sans content. Move-literacy can uncover novel approaches to ongoing philosophical debates. A novel response to a problem in...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Other

4:30pm AEST

Machine Speech: The Very Idea
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Do LLM-based systems such as ChatGPT speak? We have two aims in this paper: (1) to taxonimise the literature on machine speech, (2) to evaluate whether the question of machine speech is worth asking. Firstly, we suggest that responses fall into two camps: superficialists and deepists. Superficialists think that we can discern whether a machine speaks by considering its outward...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Philosophy of Language, Hybrid

4:30pm AEST

Hume's Necessity Found
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper argues that the strongest form of causal necessity, which David Hume advanced as unjustified, does in fact exist. It is found, paradoxically, in the relation between causal omissions and their effects. I also propose a reformulation of the ‘c causes e iff…’ analysis into a new analysis that best accounts for causal necessity. In brief, when any causal factor, intrinsic to a causal...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

4:30pm AEST

Performativity of the Right to Appear and Resistance Effects--from Butler and Arendt's Reflections
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In recent years, global demonstrations and social movements such as Black Lives Matter have mobilized diverse people to contest systemic discrimination, inequality, and genocide. Judith Butler has analyzed these modes of resistance and posits that performative resistance takes effect in assemblies formed when multiple individuals convene in public spaces, such as squares and streets. In other...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

4:30pm AEST

Social Marking and the Grounds of Generative AI Bias
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
I introduce an analytical framework for the fine-grained study of generative AI bias, applying the notion of social marking. When we say that a feature is socially marked, we mean that it stands out as unusual or noteworthy within a given social context, and that it prompts special treatment, for good or ill. I propose that much of the homogeneity of generative AI outputs results from the AI...
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Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-262
  Social Epistemology

5:00pm AEST

Young Boys Big Questions: Philosophy for the First Time
Monday July 6, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper explores the voices and lived experiences of young boys aged between 12-13 who participated in the University of Qld’s Philosothon for the first time. The Philosothon was a structured philosophical inquiry that engaged students from several local and urban Qld high schools in collaborative dialogue around critical thinking. This small study centres on the boys’ perspectives so that...
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Monday July 6, 2026 5:00pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

6:00pm AEST

Philosophy in the Diaspora: The role of philosophy in helping to navigate the complexities of modern life
Monday July 6, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm AEST
Abel Smith Lecture Theatre @ St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
Philosophy in the Diaspora: The role of philosophy in helping to navigate the complexities of modern lifeAn illuminating public panel event as part of the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, where we explore the enduring relevance of philosophy in contemporary contexts. Philosophy in the Diaspora examines how philosophical methods and knowledge shapes and responses to urgent...
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Monday July 6, 2026 6:00pm - 7:30pm AEST
Abel Smith Lecture Theatre
  Panel

8:30pm AEST

Politics in Academia
Monday July 6, 2026 8:30pm - 9:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
Should university campuses be politically neutral? In this paper I focus mainly on whether professors can or should express political views in class. Its main contribution is to distinguish between absolutist arguments, often thought by proponents to apply universally to all institutions and contexts, and more nuanced context-dependent considerations. I argue that while there are lessons to be...
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Monday July 6, 2026 8:30pm - 9:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Ethics, Online Only

9:30pm AEST

The Interconnecting Features in Spinoza's Immanent Ontology
Monday July 6, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
Baruch Spinoza is profound and insightful. He conceives the world from a geometrical standpoint, and his geometric method is demonstrative in imitation of Euclidean geometry. He believes that the same principles that govern the universe also govern the nature of things. In the universe, the conclusions of geometry necessarily follow their axioms. In the same way, the ethical and physical things...
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Monday July 6, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Metaphysics, Online Only

10:30pm AEST

Descartes on Scepticism, Habits, Freedom, and the Self
Monday July 6, 2026 10:30pm - 11:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia
This enquiry is motivated by two interrelated aims, at the core of which are two fundamental questions that troubled Descartes: ‘is a new metaphysics possible?’ and ‘is a free, autonomous enquirer possible?’. The search for a new metaphysics is not independent of but requires the attainability of freedom, transforming the self as locus of authority and autonomy. The attainability of both...
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Monday July 6, 2026 10:30pm - 11:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  History of Philosophy, Online Only
 
Tuesday, July 7
 

8:30am AEST

Check-in Desk Day 3
Tuesday July 7, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Check-in Desk open.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium

9:00am AEST

Is Method political? Empiricism, Scientism, and Normative Critiques of Methodological Practice in Political Philosophy
Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
What role should empirical methods play in political philosophy? What might be the merits of employing social science methods to address the fundamental questions political philosophers explore, such as what makes the state politically legitimate or what is the nature of a good society? A useful point of comparison here is political science. Although political science and political philosophy are...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

10:30am AEST

Morning Break
Tuesday July 7, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Tuesday July 7, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

11:00am AEST

First-Person Authority is Pluralistically Justified
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
“First-person authority” refers, roughly, to the deference that we owe one another’s self-ascriptions of mental states in ordinary contexts. What justifies this deference? Here I argue for a pluralistic answer. I argue, first, that the hearer of a self-ascription is justified in deferring to the speaker in part because the speaker expresses her attitude to the...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Epistemology, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

On Cultivating Responsible Reciprocity in Classrooms: Educational Implications of Kantian Constructivism
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Kantian constructivism (KC) highlights the sociopolitical dimension of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. While there is extensive literature on KC, its educational implications remain understudied. In this paper, I posit the cultivation of responsible reciprocity (RR) among teachers and students in classrooms as the foremost educational implication of KC. By focusing on Kant’s On Education (2003)...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Ethics, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

The Duty to Provide Moral Repair to Lab Technicians
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Animal laboratory technicians (henceforth lab technicians) are at risk of sustaining moral injuries when complicit in unethical experiments. Prima facie, it would be puzzling to offer the perpetrator of an unethical experiment psychological support in the form of moral repair. However, we argue that lab technicians are owed moral repair as a special case of our proposed duty of special concern....
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

11:00am AEST

Autonomy and Gendering in Childhood
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Supporting the development of children’s autonomy is widely recognized as a fundamental good. Despite this, social practices that reflect and reinforce patriarchal gender norms are ubiquitous. These norms, however, curtail the development and exercise of children’s autonomy by constraining their opportunities along gendered lines and promoting falsehoods about ‘natural’ identity...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206
  Feminist Philosophy

11:00am AEST

Reopening the Dutch Book
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Probabilism is the thesis that the degrees of belief of rational agents behave like mathematical probabilities. There are quite different lines of argument for probabilism in the literature, including dutch book arguments, arguments based on representation theorems (which concern the representation of preference orderings by assignments of numerical utilities and degrees of belief) and epistemic...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

11:00am AEST

Unsung Virtues
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Presentism is often seen as the simplest most intuitive ontology of time, yet direct comparisons between presentism and eternalism based on simplicity are limited. Philosophical consensus holds that presentism is quantitatively parsimonious but qualitatively identical to eternalism. Presentists also risk introducing qualitative and scientific/structural extravagance in addressing standard...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Metaphysics

11:00am AEST

Izydora Dąmbska and Maria Kokoszyńska on Truth
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Izydora Dąmbska and Maria Kokoszyńska may be listed among the most accomplished philosophers of twentieth century philosophy. Despite this, their work has been largely underappreciated, especially by truth-theorists working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. I seek to rectify this injustice by showing how their ideas represent an important innovation in truth-theory. Izydora Dąmbska has...
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Speakers
avatar for Joe Ulatowski

Joe Ulatowski

Conference Organiser, University of Waikato
2025 Conference Organiser.

I am Assistant Vice-Chancellor Sustainability, as well as Senior Lecturer and Graduate Advisor in the Philosophy Programme at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. I am also Director of the Waikato University Experimental Philosophy Research... Read More →
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Language

11:00am AEST

Proportionality Contextualized
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I propose a contextualized conception of proportionality, which requires bringing the concrete context of answering/raising a particular causal inference question into the picture when assessing proportionality. So, the new formula is this: a cause-variable C is proportional to an effect-variable E relative to a given context T. This conception is bolstered by a brief exposition of recent...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

12:00pm AEST

Absolute Knowledge
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Skeptical invariantists say that “know” refers to a very demanding epistemic relation – call it “absolute knowledge.” Standard invariantists say that “know” refers to a much less demanding epistemic relation – call it “standard knowledge.” Suppose that standard invariantists are right. Suppose also that standard knowledge (i) helps to causally explain behavior and (ii) sets one...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Epistemology, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Blame's Democratic Virtues
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Communicative-functional accounts of blame are gaining in popularity. Several of these accounts hold that blame plays a significant role in influencing moral norms (e.g. Fricker, 2016). In response, some have raised what I call the ‘might-makes-right’ worry: what if blame pushes us towards bad moral norms? Blame’s often angry, spontaneous, reactive nature might make it seem likely to push us...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

12:00pm AEST

Consequentialist Considerations, and What Moral Philosophy is For
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Many of us – ordinary people and moral philosophers alike – sound very much like rule-consequentialists. We are willing to revise and refine the rules that we endorse, the institutions that we embrace, the virtues that we espouse, and vices that we deplore; moreover, we believe – quite rightly – in doing so in light of the consequences that such things produce. But of course if we think...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Ethics, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Distrust-Based Oppressive Double Binds
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Oppressive double binds are those situations where, due to oppressive forces, no matter what choice the oppressed person makes, they contribute to their own oppression. Present and historical patterns of discrimination often give rise to dilemmas around distrust which I argue can best be described as distrust-based oppressive double binds.On one hand, for members of oppressed groups, it often...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Feminist Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Curry's Paradox Forever: A Critical Re-evaluation
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
It has long been observed that many bad logical results—especially Curry's paradox—rely on a rule called contraction. Logics without contraction thus point in a more promising direction. But it has also been observed, for almost as long, that paradoxes are very resilient; each step down the non-contractive path neutralises one variant of the paradox only for a new, more terrible one to appear....
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Bachelard's Critique of Bergson
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Much of my recent research has centred on the polemic between Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard. In particular, I have focused on the notions of continuity and discontinuity within the two philosopher’s work. I have found that recent Bergsonian scholarship has, at times, dismissed Bachelard uncharitably. I ask, however, whether such a hasty dismissal of Bachelard is necessary, let alone...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Metaphysics

12:00pm AEST

Cooperating in truth and deception: the case of Would I Lie to You?
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and maxim of Quality, it is rational to presume our interlocutors are being truthful, or at least, are trying to be truthful during conversation. However, I argue that presuming the truthfulness of an interlocutor, i.e the maxim of Quality holds, is not necessary for the CP to be operative. More generally, I argue that the CP and Grice’s...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Language

12:00pm AEST

Criticality: how Dennett’s ‘practical free will’ can be improved.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
Daniel Dennett was a compatibilist. He attempted to carve some elbow room for freedom of decision-making by inserting some indeterminism in his ‘practical free will’ model. The purpose of inserting indeterminism in decision-making processes was to break the causal chain of hard determinism and to provide a source for novelty not already implicit in past events. This would explain creativity...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Philosophy of Mind

12:00pm AEST

Compulsory Trusts as a Model for Consumer Data Ownership
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
My PhD research has been focussed on addressing the problems associated with what Sarah Myers West terms ""data capitalism"" through experiments in the two forms of political economy endorsed by John Rawls – Property-Owning Democracy or a Liberal Socialism. This paper will focus on the solution I offer for the licensing rights over what I term ‘consumer data,’ a solution, I contend, which...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

1:00pm AEST

Lunch
Tuesday July 7, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Lunch Break 
Tuesday July 7, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

2:00pm AEST

Moral Fetishism and Right-Making-Features Desires
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In metaethics, it is widely held—following Smith (1994)—that only de re desires (wanting to perform a particular act which happens to be right) are praiseworthy, whereas de dicto desires (wanting to do whatever is right) are fetishistic. In this paper, I argue that moral fetishism extends equally to what I call “right-making-feature desires,” i.e. wanting to perform an act insofar as it...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

2:00pm AEST

"How to Make Gravy" Or, Making Sense of Blended-Family Bereavement
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Bereavement is part of the human condition, and so it is unsurprising to find an array of generic social scripts which operate to scaffold interactions with the bereaved. They are generic in that we will all lose parents and friends, and many of us will lose siblings, partners, or children. Each script supposes a gravity of loss that in turn translates to a ‘space’ for grieving and delimits...
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Speakers
avatar for Louise Richardson-Self

Louise Richardson-Self

University of Tasmania
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies University of Tasmania
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Feminist Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Towards a Taxonomy of Logical Positions
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
You might endorse one of the following positions regarding the number of correct logics: either there are no correct logics (logical nihilism), one correct logic (logical monism) or there are multiple correct logics (logical pluralism). While not technically wrong, this taxonomy is too coarse-grained. This tripartite split skirts a number of important distinctions that in fact lead to...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Metaphysics Makes No Progress (and that's a Good Thing)
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 - In Person @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Science makes progress in a way that metaphysics seems not to. From Locke, Hume, and Kant through logical positivists and deconstructionists and down to (for example) David Lewis, Amy Thomasson, Mark Balaguer, John Heil and hundreds of others, philosophers have written engagingly about "progress" in philosophy. Some have concluded that it is time to give up even trying to answer metaphysical...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 - In Person
  Metaphysics

2:00pm AEST

A New Defense of Old-School Conceptual Analysis
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Traditional conceptual analysis aims at reaching reductive definitions of properties or relations (e.g. goodness) by investigating the conceptual meanings of natural language terms (e.g. 'good'). This project stands largely in disrepute today following the development of semantic externalism ("meaning ain't in the head") and the popular appeal of the Millian view that the meaning of a referring...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Language

2:00pm AEST

A Galilean Physicalist Account of Ineffability
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
Ineffability is widely regarded as one of the key features of subjective phenomenal experience by both physicalists and non-physicalists. The idea is that such experience, often conceptualized in terms of qualia, is not expressible in terms of public language, and thus scientific investigation can only target the objective, public aspects of the world and not such subjective aspects. Physicalists...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Philosophy of Mind

2:00pm AEST

Assessing the Bayesian Picture of Scientific Advice
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Richard Jeffrey (1956) famously articulated an internal critique to the argument from inductive risk (AIR) and offered an alternative picture of scientific advice, which we call “the Bayesian picture of scientific advice” (BPSA) with two essential commitments: scientists should only communicate their subjective probabilities (vs. outright beliefs) in hypotheses and doing so upholds a political...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

3:00pm AEST

Moral Authority and Ethical Expertise: Towards a Meaningful Distinction
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There is a longstanding debate within applied ethics about the possibility of ethical expertise. Peter Singer and Paulina Sliwa, among others, have argued that the content-knowledge of moral philosophers gives them ethical expertise and thereby moral authority.  Bernard Williams, Raimond Gaita and others, in contrast, contend that moral authority is not derived from content-knowledge and that...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Bioethics

3:00pm AEST

Indigenous and Non-Western Feminist Storywork that Responds to Liberal Feminism
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper is a philosophical examination of two narratives devised to invite social change (‘storyworks’; Archibald 2008). The first recounts key episodes of the life of Helen Vai’i Gorogo, a Doura woman from Papua New Guinea who experienced forced marriage and domestic violence before achieving community leadership. The second retraces Bhanu Bhatia and her sister-in-law’s shared exile...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Enabling Diverse Knowledges, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

Enough with Ethics! Legitimacy's Centrality in Everyday Human Life
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
A concept widely employed in legal and political contexts, ‘legitimacy’ can seem less applicable to everyday human activities. I argue this is a profound mistake. Many of the same factors that drive recourse to legitimacy in legal and political contexts also apply in—and fundamentally shape—everyday interpersonal, relational and organisational life. These factors include moral pluralism,...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

3:00pm AEST

Logic for Virtual Worlds
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In the second half of ``Two Dogmas", Quine argued that there could be empirical grounds to revise logic - at least in principle. Since then the most (though still not very) popular proposal for what those empirical grounds might actually be has involved quantum mechanics. Still, most logicians seem to think that quantum mechanics does not give us good enough reason for revision. This paper...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Formal Methods in Philosophy, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

The Anatomy of Privacy
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In our current digital technological age, it is said that our privacy matters more than ever. But despite no shortage of scholarly attention to the topic, we lack a comprehensive theory of what privacy is, why it matters, and when it matters. Privacy scholars are not shy about this state of affairs; in their view, our understanding of privacy is ""in disarray"", ""intractably vague"", ""a...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Chances Are...
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Various philosophers have thought that the propensity interpretation of probability faces fatal objections. They include: “Propensities are mysterious.” “We don’t know how propensities behave.” “We do know that they don’t obey the probability calculus.” “Propensities are not Humean supervenient.” And “propensities do not vindicate the Principal Principle” (Lewis’s bridge...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Metaphysics

3:00pm AEST

Philosophers, Autistics, and Three-Year Olds
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
In the Sally-Anne false belief task (Wimmer & Perner 1983), autistics and three year-olds ascribe beliefs to others based on their own knowledge of the truth rather than on the other person's justified beliefs. This phenomenon is known as the "reality bias" or "curse of knowledge." I suggest that several famous philosophical puzzles arise from the same intuition, that is the theorist's knowledge...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Philosophy of Mind

3:00pm AEST

Animal Consciousness: Inventing the Ill Defined
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The distribution question about animal consciousness concerns which animal species are conscious. Philosophers and scientists alike have been hung up on the idea that we must first define consciousness if this question is to be answered. Examples in the history of science suggest, however, that this may put the conceptual cart before the empirical horse. Inspired by Hasok Chang's work on inventing...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

4:00pm AEST

Afternoon Break
Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

4:30pm AEST

Grasping at GA_Ps
Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:55pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Few philosophers nowadays doubt the existence and significance of a persistent ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of the nature of conscious experiences and their  relation to the material world. Contemporary concerns about the explanatory gap have  their roots in Saul Kripke’s 1972 argument against the mind–brain identity theory: if a is  identical with b,...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:55pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote

9:30pm AEST

Solving the Semantic Challenge for Non-Realist Cognitivism
Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Abstract from our paper published in Synthese (2025): Recently, non-realist cognitivism has been charged with failing to meet various semantic challenges. According to one such challenge, the non-realist cognitivist must provide a non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. In this paper, we discuss the various strategies proposed to overcome this challenge. Our aim is...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Philosophy of Language, Online Only

11:30pm AEST

Love or Abuse? Chiung Yao Novels as Hermeneutical Resources
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:30pm - Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:25am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Romantic culture has long been a topic in gender studies when it comes to analysis of socialization and social construction of gender. It has been critiqued as leading to normalization of abuse and harassment of women and consequent silencing of women enduring IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) (Radway 1991). In Chinese context, romantic fictions and multi-media adaption of the stories have impacted...
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Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:30pm - Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:25am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Feminist Philosophy, Online Only
 
Wednesday, July 8
 

5:00am AEST

Debunking Identity
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Metaphysics, Online Only

8:00am AEST

Can Empirical Psychology Incorporate Moral Truth?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Philosophy of Science, Online Only

8:30am AEST

Check-in Desk Day 4
Wednesday July 8, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Check-in Desk open.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium

9:00am AEST

Philosophy in the Time of Impact
Wednesday July 8, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

10:30am AEST

Morning Break
Wednesday July 8, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Morning Break
Wednesday July 8, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

11:00am AEST

Fiction, Humour and Engaging with the Atypical
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Aesthetics

11:00am AEST

Metacognition in Aphantasia
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Cognitive science

11:00am AEST

The Relationship between Love and Politics in the work of Slavoj Zizek
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Continental Philosophy

11:00am AEST

The Buddhist Conception of Anatta and Paul Ricouer's Narrative Self in the Indonesian Youth Pledge of 1928
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Eastern philosophy, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

What Critical Thinking Is
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Epistemology

11:00am AEST

To Defer, or Not to Defer? Is that Even a Question?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 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,...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206
  Ethics

11:00am AEST

Ruddick's "Maternal Thinking" as Boulous Walker's "slow philosophy"
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Feminist Philosophy

11:00am AEST

How Not to Understand Higher-Order Quantification
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

11:00am AEST

Parsimony and the Metaphor of Ontological Free Lunches
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

12:00pm AEST

Poetry Prose Philosophy
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Aesthetics

12:00pm AEST

Doxastic Normativity in Hume: A Sceptical Reliabilist Proposal
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  ASEMP

12:00pm AEST

Desirability Bias
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Cognitive science

12:00pm AEST

Digital Scrolling as Slow Death
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Continental Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

No Wei Jose: What Xunzi Teaches Us about Grammarly
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Eastern philosophy, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Can Conversational AIs Contribute to Group Understanding?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Epistemology, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Should Trust be a Default Stance?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Ethics

12:00pm AEST

What Do We Want Sex and Gender to Be?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Speakers
avatar for Suzy Killmister

Suzy Killmister

Monash University
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Feminist Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Qualifying the Qualitative Thesis: On the Ambiguity of Conditionals
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

The Causal Structure of Human Historical Inevitability
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

1:00pm AEST

Lunch - Catered
Wednesday July 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Lunch Break - Catered by FigJam and CoFigJam 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

1:00pm AEST

Women in Philosophy Catch Up
Wednesday July 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Women in Philosophy Catch Up
Speakers
avatar for Louise Richardson-Self

Louise Richardson-Self

University of Tasmania
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies University of Tasmania
Wednesday July 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Women in Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Philosophy in the Community: Pathways, Possibilities, and Challenges
Wednesday July 8, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Moderators
avatar for Louise Richardson-Self

Louise Richardson-Self

University of Tasmania
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies University of Tasmania
Speakers
avatar for Dan Weijers

Dan Weijers

University of Waikato
Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Programme at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Sacramento, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Victoria University of Wellingt... Read More →
Wednesday July 8, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Professional Development Session, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

Aesthetic Judgments and Two-Dimensional Semantics
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Aesthetics

3:00pm AEST

Can Neuroscience Show Us that We Lack Free Will?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 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,...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Cognitive science

3:00pm AEST

Eudaimonia as Bridge: From Biological Drives to Civilisational Flourishing
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 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,...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Ethics

3:00pm AEST

Regret Aversion: A new consideration for rational choice?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

The Universe is the Product of the Unicorns
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

3:00pm AEST

How Pain Fools Everyone
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Speakers
avatar for Deborah Brown

Deborah Brown

Conference Organiser, University of Queensland
2025 Conference Organiser.
AAP Board Member.

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-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Mind

3:00pm AEST

Critical Comparison of Shinran and William James's Perspectives on Beliefs
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Philosophy of religion, Hybrid

4:00pm AEST

Afternoon Break
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

4:30pm AEST

An Apology for Number: Schiller’s Aesthetic Education and Bolzano on the Beauty of Mathematics
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Aesthetics

4:30pm AEST

Leibniz's Perspectiva Analogy
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  ASEMP, Hybrid

4:30pm AEST

The Intuitive Historian
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Cognitive science

4:30pm AEST

Slopaganda: The Interaction between Propaganda and Generative AI
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 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,...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Epistemology

4:30pm AEST

Are Individuals Morally Responsible for Deleting Their Social Media Accounts?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Ethics, Hybrid

4:30pm AEST

Authenticity Against Oppression
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Feminist Philosophy

4:30pm AEST

On the Presuppositions of Indicative Conditionals
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

4:30pm AEST

How Humanism Supports the Existence of God
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

4:30pm AEST

From Autopoiesis to Symbiotic Entanglement
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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”...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST
Steele-206
  Other

5:30pm AEST

Descartes on Representation, Resemblance, and Duplex Esse
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  ASEMP, Hybrid

5:30pm AEST

Computation, Representation and Causation in Neural Networks
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Cognitive science

5:30pm AEST

Can Parents and Their Children be Friends?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

5:30pm AEST

Codd's Theorem for Databases over Semirings
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

5:30pm AEST

Is "believes that p" vague?
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 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
  Philosophy of Language
 
Thursday, July 9
 

5:00am AEST

Josef Pieper's Novel Criticism of Scientism
Thursday July 9, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 5:00am - 5:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Philosophy of Science, Online Only

6:00am AEST

Aristotle’s Tragic Wonder
Thursday July 9, 2026 6:00am - 6:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 6:00am - 6:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Aesthetics, Online Only

7:00am AEST

The Concept of Intensity in Leibniz's Metaphysics
Thursday July 9, 2026 7:00am - 7:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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,...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 7:00am - 7:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  History of Philosophy, Online Only

8:00am AEST

Psychiatry as Pre-Paradigmatic Science
Thursday July 9, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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,...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 8:00am - 8:55am AEST
ONLINE ONLY
  Philosophy of Science, Online Only

8:30am AEST

Check-in Desk
Thursday July 9, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Check-in Desk open.
Thursday July 9, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am AEST
GCI-Auditorium

9:00am AEST

Vagueness and Nonclassical Probabilities
Thursday July 9, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

10:30am AEST

Morning Break
Thursday July 9, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Morning Break
Thursday July 9, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

11:00am AEST

Hobbesian Honour and Its Constraints
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-206
  ASEMP

11:00am AEST

Linking Solidarity and Decoloniality in Global Health Research
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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,...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Bioethics

11:00am AEST

Minimal Self v Narrative Self
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 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.,...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Eastern philosophy

11:00am AEST

Past History is Always Contemporary
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Enabling Diverse Knowledges, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

Is Reliabilist Virtue Epistemology Meritocratic?
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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....
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Epistemology, Hybrid

11:00am AEST

A Novel Defence of the Ethical Narrativity Thesis
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

11:00am AEST

Stoic Faith
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

11:00am AEST

Truth Constrained
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

11:00am AEST

A Structural Dilemma for Frankfurt-Style Cases
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

11:00am AEST

Commercial Surrogacy as Illegitimate Work
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Hobbes on Zero-Sum Power
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  ASEMP

12:00pm AEST

Enduring Interests of People with Dementia: Revising the Revision Model
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Bioethics

12:00pm AEST

The Nonduality of Subject and Object
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 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)...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Eastern philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Knowledge, Norms, and the Unification of Justification
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  Epistemology, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Interspecies Population Ethics: A Disturbing Problem for Animal Ethics
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

12:00pm AEST

Vandana Shiva: An Agrarian Virtue Ethics
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

12:00pm AEST

Perdurance by Degrees
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Formal Methods in Philosophy

12:00pm AEST

Agency in Free Will Skepticism
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

12:00pm AEST

A Real Old Dilemma for Multiple Realizability
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Philosophy of Science, Hybrid

12:00pm AEST

Reading Mill as Pragmatist on Freedom of Expression
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

1:00pm AEST

Lunch
Thursday July 9, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Lunch Break
Thursday July 9, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

2:00pm AEST

From Reason to Intuition in Spinoza's Ethics
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  ASEMP, Hybrid

2:00pm AEST

How Much Explainability is Enough?
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Bioethics

2:00pm AEST

Contemporary Philosophical Debates on Nagarjuna's Logic of Emptiness
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-309 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-309 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Eastern philosophy

2:00pm AEST

An Extensional Mereology for Fundamental Particles with Intrinsic Properties
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Formal Methods in Philosophy, Hybrid

2:00pm AEST

About Nothing in Particular
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Speakers
avatar for Calvin Normore

Calvin Normore

UCLA / University of Queensland
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  History of Philosophy

2:00pm AEST

Apocalypse Now?
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

2:00pm AEST

Possibilistic Assessment of Climate Uncertainty and Marine Ice-Cliff Instability
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

2:00pm AEST

Reciprocal Just Savings
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Pain suffering and the self. Part II?
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-237 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Bioethics

3:00pm AEST

Epistemic Encroachment
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-314 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Epistemology

3:00pm AEST

Sport, Aesthetics and the Soul
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-329 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Ethics

3:00pm AEST

Weak Agents Dealing with (Relevant) Information
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
GCI-273 HYBRID
  Formal Methods in Philosophy, Hybrid

3:00pm AEST

Why Should We Inquire Truth?
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262 @ 3 Staff House Rd, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4067
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-262
  Metaphysics

3:00pm AEST

Doing Philosophy: Community of Inquiry Without the Community
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-206
  Philosophy in the Diaspora

3:00pm AEST

The Logical Import of Non-Epistemic Values
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-315 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Philosophy of Science

3:00pm AEST

Division of Responsibility as a Foundation of Social Philosophy
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 @ 3 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...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST
Steele-320 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
  Political Philosophy

3:00pm AEST

Spinoza on the Distinction Between Modes and Propria
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID @ Global Change Institute Building, 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)...
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Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 4:00pm AEST
GCI-275 HYBRID
  ASEMP, Hybrid

4:00pm AEST

Afternoon Break
Thursday July 9, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium @ Global Change Institute Building, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Thursday July 9, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm AEST
GCI-Auditorium
  Breaks

4:30pm AEST

Verbal Disputes
Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:55pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID @ 3 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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...
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Moderators
avatar for Suzy Killmister

Suzy Killmister

Monash University
Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:55pm AEST
Steele-206-HYBRID
  Keynote, Hybrid

7:00pm AEST

CONFERENCE DINNER 2025
Thursday July 9, 2026 7:00pm - 10:15pm AEST
Customs House @ 399 Queen St, Brisbane City QLD 4000, Australia
The conference dinner is the concluding event for the AAP Conference 2025

Customs House, 399 Queen Street, Brisbane
customshouse.com.au

All conference attendees are welcome to attend the conference dinner.
This is an additional cost which can be made at the time of registration.

Thursday July 9, 2026 7:00pm - 10:15pm AEST
Customs House
  SOCIAL EVENTS
 

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