2025 KEYNOTES

 

MARY GRAHAM

METAPHYSICAL IDENTITY: TIME FOR AN AUSTRALIAN PHILOSOPHY? 

Mary Graham is a Kombumerri person (Gold Coast) through her father’s heritage and affiliated with Wakka Wakka (South Burnett) through her mother’s people.

Mary has worked across several government agencies, community organisations and universities and is a lecturer with The University of Queensland, teaching Aboriginal history, politics and comparative philosophy.  She has also lectured nationally on these subjects, and developed and implemented ‘Aboriginal Perspective’s’, ‘Aboriginal Approaches to Knowledge’ and at the post-graduation level ‘Aboriginal Politics’ into university curricula.

polsis.uq.edu.au/profile/2235/mary-graham

JOHN HEIL

GRASPING AT GA_PS

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, then there is no world at which a fails to be identical with b; as  Descartes showed, however, it is conceivable for minds to exist in the absence of  material bodies; so, Kripke concluded, minds cannot be identified with material bodies or their parts. In 1983 Joseph Levine argued that, although Kripke’s original argument  falls short of establishing that minds are distinct from material bodies, the argument has  an epistemological counterpart. The disparate character of conscious qualities and  qualities of material bodies creates an impeneratrable barrier to our understanding how  the mental could be identified with the physical. This, and other, expressly  epistemological arguments have subsequently been deployed in the service of the  metaphysical thesis originally defended by Kripke: the mental cannot be identified with  the material. This paper critically examines the widely invoked practice of drawing  metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises.  

John Heil is listed among the 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers. He works primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of mind and has teaching interests in metaphysics, logic, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy.  

philosophy.wustl.edu/people/john-heil-faha

MICHELLE LIU

Michelle Liu works on various topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. In philosophy of mind, I am interested in the nature of consciousness and the intuition of dualism.

research.monash.edu/en/persons/michelle-liu

x.com/michelleybliu

CATHERINE MILLS

PHILOSOPHY IN THE TIME OF IMPACT

Catherine Mills' research addresses ethical, social and regulatory issues that emerge around biomedical and technology innovation in human reproduction, particularly from the point of view of gender and social inequality.

research.monash.edu/en/persons/catherine-mills

x.com/reprotechethics

DAVE RIPLEY

David Ripley is a member of the philosophy department at Monash University. His research focuses on languages, logics, and the relations between them.  

davewripley.rocks

x.com/davewripley

ADRIAN WALSH

THE VEXED PROBLEM OF THE ROLE OF THE EMPIRICAL IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Adrian Walsh is Professor in Philosophy and Political Theory - at the University of New England. He is known for his expertise on political philosophy, philosophy of economics and applied ethics. Walsh is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.  

une.edu.au/staff-profiles/hass/awalsh

STEPHEN HETHERINGTON

NOT KNOWING, NOT KNOWING  -  2025 AAP PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

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 Smith, who – we readily agree  – had a well justified true belief that failed to be knowledge: we know that Smith did not know. We do so, even when not agreeing with each other on why he did so.

Or might we fail to have even such minimal knowledge of Smith’s not knowing? That basic Gettieristic view of his epistemic plight has long functioned as a methodologically foundational element within philosophical attempts to uncover knowing’s nature. But should it do so? This paper approaches that question from two directions. And the stakes are surprisingly high. What epistemological knowledge, if any, has underwritten philosophy’s Gettieristic attempts to describe knowledge’s nature fully and fairly?

I begin by constructing a meta-Gettier tale. The moral of it is simple: we should be able to think of ourselves and other epistemologists as afflicted – given the past few decades of post-Gettier aporia – in much the same way as, supposedly, Smith was afflicted within the first of those 1963 tales. If Smith was Gettiered, then so are those epistemologists – that multitude – who regard him as being so: if he fails to know, so do they. Their failure is meta-epistemic, though: they fail to know that he fails to know.

Then I explain one way in which that meta-epistemic failure arises. Epistemologists fall foul of a simple Platonic moral when striving to explain how Smith (or anyone else, when Gettiered in like manner) fails to know. I draw partly upon the idea of what Rachel Barney calls Platonic qua predication. My explanation will not depend on hearkening back to Plato. But should the fact that it can be formulated in such ancient terms be chastening for any resolutely contemporary epistemologist who maintains that some, even if slight, genuine progress in understanding knowledge’s nature was made by Gettier?

Where do those failures leave Gettierism? Ungrounded? Unexplained? Non-explanatory? Perhaps so. Should we grieve for that potential loss? I hope not. Might it encourage us to explore fresh ways of conceiving of knowing’s nature? Could we do this while no longer holding ourselves answerable to Gettierism’s being correct in its most basic claim? I hope so.

Stephen Hetherington is an Australian analytic philosopher specialising in epistemology and metaphysics. He is an emeritus professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, a prolific author, and served as editor-in-chief of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy from 2013 to 2022.  

unsw.edu.au/staff/stephen-hetherington

x.com/StephenHetheri5