AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

11:00am NZST

Making Sense of Pain

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

A natural assumption is that the function of pain is to cause nocifensive behaviour. But what if this causal assumption is just wrong? An alternative theory is that the function of pain is to explain not cause behaviour. This is the sense making sense hypothesis (SMS). According to SMS, although withdrawal behaviour is caused by non-conscious neural processing, the brain needs a model of this processing that it can use in decision-making. This paper explores two questions: (1) What kind of explanation could plausibly fit a subjective experience like pain? and (2) Does it make sense to suppose that pain could have a non-causal function? The physical closure principle seems to entail that if one physical event is connected to another in an explanation, the two must be causally related. But is this really so obvious? Recent work on grounding offers one buffer against that inference, but there might be other ways without relying on grounding to question whether a commitment to physical closure entails anything about the relationship between explanation and causation.

Speakers

Deb Brown

University of Queensland

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 →

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Psychoneural Identities

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

Among the many drivers of the 21st-century ‘practice turn’ in philosophy of science are a shift from theory construction to modelling; another was the thesis that psychoneural identity claims function as dispensable heuristics guiding discovery. An examination of the history of research on reward and motivation suggests otherwise. What are often taken to be conjectures about psychoneural identities are better understood as appeals to familiar forms of mechanistic reasoning about constitution and localisation. A clearer understanding of scientific representation does not necessarily support the rejection of traditional identity theories.

Speakers

Cory Wright

Professor & Chair, CSULB

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Paradise Lost: Rationalist Optimisation and the Transformation of Nature

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

The environment is immoral and needs to be engineered to accord with our measures of the good, claim animal ethics and effective altruist philosophers. We should engage in “paradise engineering”: the deliberate deployment of advanced biotechnology to engineer nature according to a welfare or utility-based metric. This movement has taken transhumanist thought, amplified and funded by the EA-rationalist movement, and then applied it to nature. This requires a denial of non-welfare-based forms of non-instrumental value. While I agree with critics that radical transformationalism is unwarranted due to feasibility and deference-based reasons, I will raise a more fundamental ethical objection. I argue that the subjugation of nature to accord with human moral metrics diminishes nature's ability to be a robust producer of non-instrumental values. I develop what I call a meta-option-value argument: nature is a robust and open-ended generator of non-instrumental value relations, and people reliably create novel forms of such valuation over time. The intentional transformation of ecological systems cuts this generative capacity in ways that no instrumentalist accounting can recover. The transformationist, therefore, needs to not only show that their displacement of existing value is legitimate but that they are justified in diminishing a source of future value.

Speakers

Chris Lean

Macquarie University

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Ethics, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Thinking with Other Minds: A Sociocultural Enactivist Approach

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

My paper argues that cognition is fundamentally and constitutively structured by an agent’s ongoing engagement within social roles and shared norms. It investigates how socio-cultural structures constitute the space of possible actions and inferences available to embodied agents. I propose that roles, and the expected and regular norms that individuate them, function as dynamically evolving constraints on shared state spaces, shaping trajectories of action and forming the basis of habitual, socially situated cognition. On this view, sociocultural structures are not merely external influences but organizing conditions that co-constitute what counts as intelligible action.
Conceptually, the project defends the claim that the stabilizing patterns of sociocultural structures should be treated as constitutive elements of distributed cognitive systems. Norms and shared practices organize what actions make sense, shape the appearance of reasons, help determine what is experienced as appropriate, expected and possible for agents as they skillfully navigate the world. Drawing on enactivism, I develop an account in which social practices sediment into habits, stabilize as institutions, and recursively structure future cognition and action. This framework integrates distributed cognition, social ontology, and collective intentionality.

Speakers

Will Wright

University of Memphis

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

11:00am NZST

The Generation of Justification: Testimony and Memory

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

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

Speakers

Sui Shimizu

Hokkaido University

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

Epistemology, In Person

12:00pm NZST

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

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

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

Speakers

Hao-Pu Kang

National Chung Cheng University

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

Epistemology, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Virtue Signalling in the Classroom

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

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

Speakers

William Tuckwell

Lecturer, Charles Sturt University

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

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

Social Epistemology, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Habitual Critique: Between Nature and Spirit

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

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

Speakers

Melvin Kivinen

Australian Catholic University

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

Continental Philosophy, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Epistemic Reasons Always Lose

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

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

Speakers

Danielle Lawrence

Volunteer, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

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

Epistemology

11:00am NZST

Bostrom's Transhumanism: Misunderstanding the Human

Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

Transhumanism advances the view that enhancing human cognitive and physical capacities through technological means constitutes the primary route to the greatest good. On this view, the current human condition is deficient and inefficient, and should be optimised, re-engineered, or even transcended into a “posthuman” status to achieve flourishing.
I critically analyse Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist framework, focusing in particular on three key ideas: his characterisation of the human as a rational, isolated, and disembodied agent; of limits as constraints to be overcome; and of flourishing as the maximisation of capacities and subjective wellbeing alongside the minimisation of effort and suffering. I argue that this individualistic and reductionist account of the human, limits, and flourishing is inconsistent with ecological and scientific understandings of human nature.
Drawing on ecological, system, and relational approaches – including embodied cognition, complex systems theory, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relational ontology – I present an alternative view of humans as embodied, situated, and relational beings, constituted through dynamic interactions with ecological and evolutionary processes. From this perspective, limits are not merely constraints, but constitutive conditions of flourishing.

Speakers

Sara Campolonghi

MRes student, Macquarie University

I am an early career researcher with a PhD in Health and a Master's in Clinical and Community Psychology. I am currently undertaking a Master of Research in Philosophy at Macquarie University with a project on Transhumanism and human enhancement, particularly the work of Nick Bostrom... Read More →

Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Ethics, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Agentic AI without Machine Agency

Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

Talk of “agentic AI” can illuminate real changes in technical delegation, but it can also move agency-talk toward artificial systems while human and institutional actors recede from view. This paper argues that responsible AI governance requires neither machine personhood nor metaphysical quietism, but fitting individuation: naming AI systems enough to govern, contest, authorize, and repair their uses without personifying them beyond warrant. On this account, AI systems are not autonomous moral agents, but socio-technical deployments through which judgment, authority, risk, and responsibility flow. The central question is therefore not simply “Is the AI an agent?” but “Where must judgment, contestability, and answerability be located for this deployment to remain governable?” I propose three adequacy tests: identity credentials sufficient for governance, delegation-with-answerability, and responsibility-flow mapping. These tests distinguish legitimate technical delegation from agency laundering, explanation theatre, and nominal human oversight. The result is a modest metaphysical account of AI: thick enough to locate responsibility, light enough to avoid machine mystification, and practical enough to guide institutional governance.

Speakers

Kenneth Howarth

Professor of Philosophy, Mercer County Community College

Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

2:00pm NZST

AI Ambiguity and the Contagion of Disrespect

Wednesday July 8, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

Many think that we should respect humans and not AIs. This paper shows that this approach runs into trouble in “ambiguous spaces,” where we can’t tell whether someone is an AI. We can either extend respect to ambiguous agents, or withhold respect from them. Either approach comes with significant costs. We call this dilemma the contagion of disrespect. Extending respect ties our hands, and incentivizes people to deploy ambiguous AIs against us. Withholding respect risks blocking some humans from respect, and risks creating spirals of disrespect.

Speakers

Brandon Yip

Singapore Management University

Hi there, I’m Brandon Yip. I’m an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Singapore Management University. My research covers a range of interconnected questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and meta-ethics, with an eye to how these connect with... Read More →

Wednesday July 8, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Artificial Inteligence, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Childhood Practical Reason and Dependency in the Age of GenAI

Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

The use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) by children demands critical examination over whether and how the technology affects their cognitive development. Given the growing empirical research showing the impacts of GenAI on human cognition, this paper aims to philosophically examine the threats that this technology may pose to children’s development as practical reasoners, given the importance of childhood and adolescence in developing this central capability. This paper first outlines and justifies the use of the Capabilities Approach and the particular focus on the central capability of practical reason. I then explore empirical research which shows that GenAI may put downward pressure on children’s ability to reach the necessary threshold for practical reason. I then argue that, due to the pressures it places on this capability, if children are unable to reach the necessary threshold for practical reason due to cognitive offloading and delegation to GenAI, they may be at risk of becoming dependent on GenAI tools and the corporations that control them. Such dependency would raise two important critiques of the adoption of GenAI in childhood and education: first, prudential critiques where the agent’s own interests are undermined; second, political critiques where unjust social forces are reinforced and exacerbated.

Speakers

Siavosh Sahebi

Macquarie University

Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Artificial Inteligence, In Person

11:00am NZST

Phenomenology of Disability and the Doctor/Patient Relationship

Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

In her book, Illness, Havi Carel writes of her own experience, “I quickly learned that when doctors ask ‘How are you?’ they mean ‘How is your body?’” (Illness 48). While this mismatch between the use of ‘you’ here might be excused by most as a mundane confusion of language, this dual role of the self, as both bodily and social, revealed through the doctor/patient relationship, speaks to the heart of a long-lasting intellectual debate within ‘disability studies theory’ regarding how we conceptualise what it means to be disabled. In this paper, I critically evaluate this relationship and look to what the emerging field of ‘disability phenomenology’ can contribute here. In particular, I develop an argument for the reinterpretation and use of Jean-Paul Sartre’s chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness for the field of disability studies. Arguing against Sarah Richmond’s criticisms of his view in her article, “Sartre and the Doctors,” I propose that Sartre provides a foundation for an effective philosophy of disability, explaining the dual role of the body for the disabled subject while being sensitive to their individual conception of selfhood.

Speakers

Mikel Van Dyken

University of Queensland

Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Continental Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

What Does It Mean To Be 'Always Ready'?

Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

Since the 1980s, and especially into the 1990s, the phrase “always already” came to be used well beyond its specialised context in Continental Philosophy, becoming ubiquitous in a range of academic disciplines within the general orbit of poststructuralism, and loosely in connection with the legacy of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this paper, I want to do three things: (i) trace the conceptual background of the “always already” (immer schon) formulation in Kantian and post-Kantian thought, especially via the phenomenology of Hegel through to Husserl and Heidegger, as well as touching on the phrase’s implicit theological overtones; (ii) consider the terms ‘always’ and ‘already’ very literally as they are used in ordinary language in English in order to then think more about what it means for them to be put together (and how this in turn helps us consider the phrase’s distinct usage in the Phenomenological tradition); and (iii) to argue for the implications of thinking about the ‘always already’ formulation in such a way for engaging both with Indigenous conceptions of temporality and place, and with the phenomenology of Deep Time.

Speakers

Leah McGarrity

Australian Catholic University

Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Continental Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

A sympathetic response to skepticism about empathy

Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

Empathy was introduced to philosophy as a solution to the problem of other minds skepticism, the doubt whether other minds exist at all, which arises from the Cartesian dualist picture of the mind as metaphysically hidden (Lipps 1907). Already in Lipps’s work, and from then on into contemporary philosophical discussion, empathy in its various forms is commonly seen as our way to know what specific minds believe and feel and desire in specific scenarios. In this paper, I focus on affective empathy, usually seen as the success of a simulation effort, where one tries to adopt the perspective of another and imagine oneself in the other’s situation (e.g. Coplan 2011). I shall argue that this attempt is resting on a misguided notion of similarity between two people, and that the epistemic stance simulation involves is objectifying and obliterating of the other’s individuality. Relying on the work of the psychoanalyst Neville Symington (2018), I propose a new associative-imaginative account of affective empathy, which involves the surrender of the epistemic position and a genuine moment of a communion in feeling.

Speakers

Talia Morag

Australian Catholic University

Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Philosophy of Mind, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Film and the Mode of Dream

Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

I take it that in watching a film one is imaginatively presented with an as-if reality. In this talk I’d like to explore the idea that the mode of viewing a film is closely analogous to the imaginative mode of viewing a dream. I shall take up and extend Suzanne Langer’s suggestion in “A Note on the Film” that film is presented to the viewer in “the dream mode” by reflecting on the relation between dream and imagination as theorized by Bernard Williams (“Imagination and the Self”). I end with some tentative thoughts about why this connection between film and dream is important.

Speakers

David Macarthur

Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney

Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Aesthetics, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Between Reason and Desire: Brandom on the Moral Valet

Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

In this paper we propose a critical reading of Robert Brandom’s reading, in A Spirit of Trust, of the final eleven paragraphs of the Spirit chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the crucial paragraph 665 – the discussion of the Kammerdiener, or “moral valet”. We argue that Brandom significantly understates the role that desire plays in Hegel’s account of the institution of normativity. This interpretive disagreement has implications for Brandom’s broader philosophical project, including his critical treatment of the “genealogical” tradition, and his rejection of the “instrumental pragmatist” strand in classical U.S. pragmatism. On our preferred interpretation of the moral valet passage, Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is closer to both of these post-Hegelian traditions than Brandom’s rational reconstruction acknowledges.

Speakers

Duncan Law

Nicole Pepperell

Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Continental Philosophy, In Person