School of Philosophy

According to Counterfactual Skepticism, we know next to none of the counterfactuals we assert in ordinary life. The most influential argument for this conclusion rests on premises that are now widely disputed. This talk outlines a new argument for Counterfactual Skepticism that does not depend on these controversial premises. 

However, unlike some, Joshua is not a skeptic and instead seeks the best ways to resist the view. A central fault line in the literature on counterfactuals concerns the status of the controversial principle ‘Conditional Excluded Middle’ (CEM). 

Brandon Yip proposes a framework for wonder that accounts for its heterogeneity and explains and clarifies disputes about the ethics of wonder. The various species of wonder are unified as responses to a recurrent practical situation: that of recognising that our cognitive structures require alteration in order to accommodate some object. This recognition is momentous in its implications for the self, yet its evaluative implications can be indeterminate.

We increasingly form enduring and emotionally salient bonds with AI-powered technologies. Yet, arguably, most of the users don’t actually believe that these technologies harbour genuine affective (and more generally mental) states towards them. Why, then, do users bond with technologies? What mental states support and enable the flourishing of such human-AI bonds, leading some users to even fall in love with their AI companions?

The Continuity axiom of expected utility theory implies that no catastrophe is so bad that one should not be willing to accept a gamble that might result in that catastrophe, as long as the gamble is sufficiently likely to instead result in some improvement on the status quo. This is implied by most normative decision theories, including risk-averse alternatives to expected utility theory. In this seminar, Joe Roussos argues that when there is significant uncertainty about the probabilities, these trade-offs are not warranted.

Many pressing social problems require coordinated changes across multiple interconnected domains. Climate action, for instance, requires simultaneous transitions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and consumer behaviour, where success in each domain depends on progress in others. In their joint work, Chad Lee-Stronach and Rory Smead ask: under what conditions can socially optimal coordination across domains emerge and persist? and formalise this challenge as the "problem of interdependent conventions'' using evolutionary game theory. 

Leibniz's Dream: How to Automate Legal Reasoning with Artificial Intelligence 

In the 17th Century, the philosopher, mathematician, and lawyer Gottfried Leibniz envisioned the creation of a characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator that would enable reasoning in law and morals as systematically as in geometry and analysis. His goal was to resolve legal disputes with the precision and clarity with which accountants settle financial discrepancies.

The paper examines the sense of body ownership through various empirical and clinical phenomena, including somatoparaphrenia and the Rubber Hand Illusion. These examples demonstrate that both the sense of ownership and its disownership are experiential phenomena, with specific neurological and affective correlates. The role of affect is further explored, particularly in how affective responses contribute to the experience of ownership.

Political philosophers rarely analyse the categories of “left” and “right” in their own right, yet these labels structure much of public political debate. This talk, framed as a response to Joshi’s 2020 paper, What Are the Chances You’re Right About Everything? An Epistemic Challenge for Modern Partisanship, considers three questions:

Some philosophical inquiry is directed at our thought and talk about a subject matter (e.g. how to understand the nature of moral thought, or our concept of consciousness), while other philosophical inquiry is directed towards understanding the “things themselves” (e.g. the nature of moral facts and properties, or of consciousness itself). David Plunkett and Tristram McPershon's paper considers the methodology of the latter, “object-level” type of inquiry by introducing a contrast between two ways of structuring this kind of inquiry. 

On the suppositions that criminal punishment requires blameworthiness and that blameworthiness requires culpability in addition to wrongdoing, the issue raised about punishment for negligently caused harm is whether and how inadvertent but unreasonable risk-taking (i.e., negligence) makes a wrongfully acting agent culpable.