AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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 learned from each, the absolutist arguments fail. While this means that things are, and there may not be a one size fit all ideal prescription (Schliesser, 2024), the paper describes a plethora of considerations that should be considered when devising policies.  
The paper examines three absolutist arguments, one against neutrality and two in favor. The first is that neutrality is impossible, it is a myth that serves those in power, and therefore professors should not be neutral (Dea, n.d.; Giroux, 2020, p. 210) . The second is that when professors use their social status and role in classrooms to express their political opinions, it is an abuse of power. The third is that professors, when talking as professors, should talk only about their areas of expertise and research (Fish, 2008). When they express their political views, they are not doing so.

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 follow from the nature of things. To this effect, he introduces some definitions from which he deduces a systematic structure whose parts are logically connected. Thus, he developed his theory by deductive reasoning.

His entire theory can be summed up in substance, attributes and modes. These are three parts of the universe and the fundamental structures of his entire thought. Substance is the framework of all reality. Attributes are the primary expressions of the substance, either in a bodily form or a conceptual form. The modes are the particular modifications of the substance.

This paper discusses the five interconnecting features in Spinoza's immanent ontology: substance monism, univocity of attributes, the status of modes, immanent causality and relational ethics. It argues that these interconnecting features comprehensively formulate Spinoza’s concept of substance.

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 is predicated on Descartes’ constructive conception of scepticism, which is completely different from what is considered as ‘Cartesian scepticism’.

My first aim is to shed light on the ways in which Descartes’ response to scepticism has metaphysical and moral implications, and on his order of reasoning, which is indispensable to his metaphysical turn and ontological shift away from Scholasticism.

The second is to explore the connection between scepticism, habits, and freedom, as against misattributions to Descartes’ undertaking. Doubt requires reason and freedom. Without freedom from prejudicial intellectual habits and prevailing Principles, Descartes’ enquiry would not get off the ground. This triad of notions has far-reaching consequences for our philosophical concerns, yet it has gone unnoticed in the vast literature on scepticism.
A sceptical enquirer is a searcher after truth. Descartes’ concern is not primarily the external world, but truth.

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 to propose a new semantics, a Meinongian referential semantics that is based on truthmaker theory. The consequences of our proposal are two-fold. First, it alleviates objections raised against previous Meinongian semantic approaches. Second, adopting the novel semantics highlights the great theoretical flexibility of non-realist cognitivism.

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 readership in the last 50 years (or longer) (Liu 2008), among them Chiung Yao contributed 40 years of active writing. Since 1962, Chiung Yao’s stories have been made into more than 100 TV series and films. However, her impact is undertheorized compared to female writers in her era.

Feminist epistemologists theorize the inability to communicate one’s critical social experience as hermeneutical injustice and made further inquiry into the collective hermeneutical resources (Berenstain 2020; Clanchy 2023; Dular 2023; Falbo 2022; Fricker 2007; Mason 2011; Medina 2012, 2013, 2017; Mills 2013; Jenkins 2017, 2021; Simion 2019). I argue that Chiung Yao’s romances, among other stories, constitute an important part of Chinese romantic culture and serve as hermeneutical resources when people draw concepts about love. The endorsement of IPV exhibited in her plots induces hermeneutical injustice of her readers, who fail to express discomfort in a toxic relationship due to normalization of abuse in Chiung Yao’s description of love. This paper contributes to the vivid discussion of hermeneutical injustice, IPV, toxic relationships and intersectional feminism.

Debunking arguments aim to show that our beliefs do not track the world, by identifying a certain etiology that confers negative epistemic status to our beliefs. For instance, we believe that murder is wrong. Debunker comes in by stating that we have such a belief because we evolved to belief that murder is wrong given that it is maladaptive. Since that is the case, our moral beliefs do not stand for moral facts. In this paper I aim to put forward a novel type of debunking arguments—the one that pertains to identity. Roughly, I claim that we have intuitions about what makes objects different from other objects and that such intuitions can be debunked. The first intuition—the unity intuition—states that we think that objects are singular if they have enough unity. The second intuition—the spatial boundary intuition—states that we think that objects are singular up to the point where they meet unoccupied space. The claim is that, analogously to a moral case, we evolved to have such intuitions which makes them epistemically problematic. If it weren’t for evolution, we wouldn’t think that objects are singular, nor we would have intuitions about what makes them singular. The upshot is that we have a reason to suspend or reduce credence to our beliefs about identity.

Can empirical psychology—qua scientific discipline—incorporate objective moral truth? That is, are appeals to objective moral truth scientifically acceptable, viable, and legitimate—i.e., are they scientifically adequate? I consider this question through an examination of a particular case, namely, whether objective moral error is a viable scientific kind. I first examine objective moral errors per comprehensive moral theories proffered as the objective moral truth (“Objective CMT”). Importantly, I show that moral philosophical adequacy is not necessarily sufficient for scientific adequacy. I conclude that—currently—such objective moral errors are scientifically inadequate because, lacking a CMT well-established as the objective moral truth, condoning such errors yields the untenable result of different researchers using incompatible standards-of-moral-correctness that generate incommensurable versions of the kind. I reject two potential partners-in-guilt. Finally, I examine objective moral errors that contravene specific moral principles proffered as objective moral truths. I argue that because of the strength of metaethical skepticism within a scientific context, coupled with the availability of viable alternatives to objective moral truths—namely, standards-of-interest—all potential objective moral errors, as well as all appeals to objective moral truth, are scientifically inadequate and incompatible with empirical psychology (qua science).

In his small, often-neglected book Verteidigungsrede fur die Philosophie (1966), philosopher Josef Pieper offers an ingenious criticism of scientism, the thesis that all knowledge is from science. While proponents of scientism are few and far between for well-known problems such as its self-referential incoherence, science's descriptive and explanatory limits, extra-scientific assumptions, and failure to take seriously the qualitative features of reality (plus its materialist underpinnings, though not all are worried on this matter, no pun intended), nonetheless Pieper's criticism displaces both scientism and the move towards so-called "weak scientism" (the thesis that science is broader than natural sciences) and "epistemic opportunism" (the thesis that we should be optimists about scientific success). Following the demise of the Early Vienna Circle and logical positivism on what "empirical" and "observation" mean, Pieper's argument is that scientism intrinsically carries with it an implausible concept of experience, and so should be rejected. Here is the structure of the argument. Because science is an empirical (a posteriori) endeavor, it requires an intelligible notion of experience (or observation). Scientism must say that what exhausts experience is simply the natural world as experienced by our senses. However, this leaves out much of the world as we experience it, not only in its extra-scientific qualities (Schrödinger provides some entertaining examples) but also in the objects of experience themselves ("moral experience", as some call it, is a paradigmatic example). The theoretical advantages of this broad(er) account of experience (which is incompatible with scientism) are its alignment with moral-epistemic virtues like epistemic justice, as well as science's praise for dispassionate objectivity. Broader accounts of experience carry concerns as well, especially Platonic concerns about appearances versus reality, but all this shows - says Pieper - is that the philosophical act is indispensable.

This talk will explore Aristotle’s concept of tragic wonder (to thaumaston), accompanied by shock (ekplexis). Despite the enormous interest in the Poetics, not many scholars (e.g., Kyriakou 1995, 88-96; Drake 2010) have analyzed closely the importance of wonder for best tragedies. While any unusual elements can arouse wonder in Methaphysics (1.982b12-14), tragic wonder should follow a narrower pattern: a logical plot structure that turns “beyond expectation” (para tēn doxan, Poetics 9.1452a3). This preference merits a deeper analysis than it has received. We shall investigate (1) why the Homeric epic seems to be given more freedom than tragedy in constructing wondrous incidents; (2) the reasons for which even the illusion of a precise dramatic purpose is better than randomness and (3) why this paradoxical tragic structure (logical and yet culminating in shock) surpasses all the other types of plots in the Poetics. As an illustration, we will focus on a puzzling case study, Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, which remains an Aristotelian favorite for achieving the wondrous effect despite ending with a series of illogical incidents. Finally, a sharp distinction will be drawn between the Aristotelian preferences and modern ideas of dramatic suspense.

It is generally accepted that Leibniz’s a posteriori argument which seeks to establish that force, measured by mv2 rather than mv, is conserved in the universe, has direct bearing on his broader metaphysical agenda. Leibniz is not simply introducing a new physical quantity and an argument for its conservation. He seeks to furnish a metaphysical foundation of mechanical physics.

This aim, arguably, is even more patent in his a priori argument for the conservation of actio. As Leibniz writes to De Volder, this argument is the “gate” through which one is to pass to the right metaphysics. I offer to bring into relief the metaphysical significance of the concept of intensity (intensio) in Leibniz’s a priori argument. Leibniz argues that quantity of actio is a product of intensity and extensity (extensio). Intensity is either velocity (when extensity is space) or square of velocity (when extensity is time). When taken in the latter sense, I argue, intensity receives a metaphysical inflection. Scholars have traced this notion to the medieval language of latitudo formarum. I contend that it denotes a degree of primitive activity constitutive of a singularity of substance, akin to Scotus’s notion of intensity as a degree of being’s perfection.

Psychiatry faces profound challenges a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Most notably, there are various philosophical disputes pertaining to a) dimensional vs. categorical models of mental disorder, b) the status of psychiatric kinds, c) states vs. traits as the central constructs of psychiatry, and d) the language of “mental disorder” vs. “mental variation.” Furthermore, these ontological disputes are accompanied by methodological disputes regarding which causal factors are most relevant to formulating generalizations about particular mental disorders. Meanwhile, the DSM faces both a validity crisis and a comorbidity crisis. These problems have motivated some in the field to formulate new research traditions– such as RDoC and HiTOP– which offer distinct and novel approaches to the subject matter of psychiatry. The central claim that I advance here is that contemporary psychiatry approximates a pre-paradigmatic Kuhnian science. I take Kuhn’s theory of scientific practice and change as an idealized model– one which abstracts away from the details of particular episodes in the histories of particular sciences, but which nevertheless presents an “ideal type” for how scientific progress often occurs. Two alternative explanations that I will address here are 1) the Human Science Explanation and 2) the Medical Science Explanation.