Schedule for Semester 1, 2026

24th February

Toby Handfield (Monash)

Modelling Cooperative Dilemmas for Science

Scientists have complex motivations: pure curiosity, prestige, status, citations, grant dollars, and more. Scientists are also embedded in strategic contexts – their best choice of research strategy often depends on what other scientists are doing. In this work we develop a model of scientists engaged in a simplified process of inquiry via falsification, and show that even with very simple, primarily epistemic motivations, strategic tensions arise between different scientific groups. This can lead to paradoxical results, where scientists who are more motivated by truth are slower to achieve the true theory than more conservative scientists who are more reluctant to abandon their preferred views. We discuss implications for how scientific communities should balance openness to new evidence against the stability needed for productive research.

3rd March

James Franklin (UNSW)

Ethics can’t do without metaphysics

Metaphysics-phobia is rife in ethics and political philosophy. Rawls for example claims that his conception of justice is “political not metaphysical”. That orientation of the field has favoured conceptions of ethics as fundamentally about evolved customs, or “traffic rules for self-assertors” (Annette Baier), rather than views that take ethics to be seriously answerable to something in the way things are. The talk argues that foundational studies in (human) ethics should take metaphysics seriously, especially the extensive theories of supervenience (or grounding). A fundamental concept in ethics is the worth of persons – surely the main reason why murder is wrong is the terminal harm to the victim, and harm is a concept that implies the worth of the entity harmed. Worth is argued to be a metaphysically and ethically strong concept, grounded (in the metaphysicians’ sense) in properties of the human person that are not themselves ethical (classically, rationality, but modern sensibilities favour a wider base including, for example, the will, love, individuality …).

10th March

No seminar this week

17 March

Sam Shpall (University of Sydney)

Limerence and the Relationship Escalator

Limerence is a distinctive human experience, widely but misleadingly described as “being in love.” Drawing on the psychological work of Dorothy Tennov (1979), I sketch a phenomenological account of this experience, and note that some intriguing questions about its prevalence naturally arise. I then use this account to develop a new analysis of the “Relationship Escalator,” a concept that figures prominently in recent writing on ethical non-monogamy. My goal is to illuminate a network of assumptions linking limerence, romantic love, monogamy, and parenting — assumptions that rest on a persistent confusion between limerence and romantic love — and to explore what follows once that confusion is dispelled. The results cut in different directions: some prevailing ideas deserve to be abandoned, while others, including a neglected argument connecting limerence and monogamy, deserve a sympathetic hearing.

24th March

Adam Piovarchy (Notre Dame)

Conspiracy Theories and the Ways of Bayes

Is there something epistemically defective about conspiracy theories as a class? Generalists argue there is something about conspiracy theories that makes them generally unjustified, unlikely, or less credible than other kinds of explanations. Particularists, in contrast, deny this. Because many conspiracy theories are true, just as many non-conspiracy theories are false, we should evaluate individual conspiracy theories according to the evidence for each. This paper argues for a defeasible generalism by taking a closer look at what would count as strong evidence for or against a conspiracy theory. Using Bayes’ theorem, I illustrate how several argumentative moves made by both conspiracy theorists and particularists incur significant costs that are often overlooked. The ease with which conspiracy theories’ content lends themselves to these moves leads people to misunderstand when they have evidence for a conspiratorial hypothesis. Scepticism of conspiracy theories is thus generally warranted as a corrective to their tendency to be misleadingly convincing.

Please note: this talk assumes some familiarity with Bayes’ theorem; any popular YouTube explainer will suffice.

31st March

Brian Ballsun-Stanton (Macquarie University)

An Absence of Judgment: AI’s Limitations in Deep Research tasks

This paper introduces the concept of “technoscholasticism” to analyse fundamental limitations in AI research tools. Through autoethnographic investigation of frontier models deployed in February 2025, we demonstrate that these systems, despite claims of “agentic” capabilities, lack three crucial dimensions of judgment: epistemic humility, inductive capacity, and correspondence with reality. Like medieval scholastics, these tools privilege textual authority over critical assessment of knowledge claims, explaining their inability to generate novel insights despite vast information access. While acknowledging potential “mundane utility” for specific research tasks, we propose architectural and methodological requirements for more effective research tools that acknowledge these inherent constraints and integrate human judgment at critical junctures. These findings contribute to both theoretical understanding of AI epistemology and practical approaches to scholarly tool design.

7th April

[No meeting - Mid-semester break]

14th April

[No meeting - Mid-semester break]

21st April

Kate Lynch (University of Melbourne)

TBC

28th April

Clayton Littlejohn (ACU)

TBC

5th May

Bronwyn Finnigan (The Australian National University)

TBC

12th May

Kael McCormack (University of Geneva)

Pursuing the Good, Moved by the Good: How Desires Motivate

Desires have a puzzling dual character. In one sense, desires are passive. Desires are spontaneous, and not the result of reasoning or voluntary choice. The experience of desiring is spontaneous: I find myself moved to acquire the object of desire. Desires look like a constraint on agency. Yet, in another sense, desires are active. My desire is not something separate from me and I don’t simply observe it as an inner event. Rather, the desire consists of my moving myself in pursuit of the object of my desire. Desires look like an exercise of agency. So, my desire is both a constraint on my agency and an exercise of my agency: what simply happens to me is something I do. How is the dual character of desire possible? I explore several possible answers that attempt to “split” the self into two, or the event of desiring into two mental states, or the intentionality of desires into two distinct relations. I use this discussion to motivate my own preferred view that explains the duality of desire in terms of a more fundamental unifying factor. On this view, the active and passive dimensions of desires result from a discrimination of value.