Zachary William Lee Goodsell
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I am assistant professor of philosophy (Presidential Young Professor) at the National University of Singapore. In the 2023-24 academic year I was Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. My doctorate is from the University of Southern California, completed in 2023. Before that I studied at the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland in Australia.
My research interests include logic, decision theory, epistemology and the philosophy of probability, ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language.
Contact me at [email protected].
Publications expand collapse
Forthcoming
Unknowable Truths (with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne)
Forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. Reviews the history of the Church-Fitch argument against verificationism (the view that every truth is possibly known), and finds reason to doubt the effectiveness of those arguments. Then refutes verificationism with a new argument.
Morality Does Not Encroach (with John Hawthorne)
Forthcoming in Knowledge and Rationality: Essays in Honor of Stewart Cohen. Argues that the recently popular hypothesis of moral encroachment is in tension with important ideas in epistemology.
Symmetry, Invariance, and Imprecise Probability (with Jake Nebel)
Forthcoming in Mind. Evaluates alleged consequences of the paradoxes of measure in the philosophy of probability.
2024
Arithmetic is Necessary
Forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophical Logic 53: 1145-1159. Establishes the noncontingency of arithmetical sentences from weaker assumptions than Arithmetic is Determinate.
Decision Theory Unbound
In Noûs 58: 669-695. A general axiomatic framework for decision theory in the presence of unbounded value is developed by investigating various consequences and consistency results.
2022
Tossing Morgenbesser's Coin
In Analysis 82 (2): 214-221. Morgenbesser's Coin is a thought experiment that exemplifies a pervasive tendency to infer counterfactual independence from causal independence. I argue that this tendency is mistaken by way of a closely related thought experiment.
2021
Arithmetic is Determinate
In the Journal of Philosophical Logic 51: 127-150. Arithmetical truths are shown to be determinately true in a minimal plural modal logic for determinacy.
A St Petersburg Paradox for Risky Welfare Aggregation
In Analysis 81 (3): 420-426. The principle of Anteriority says that prospects are equally good if they are equally good for every possible person. I show that Anteriority is inconsistent with some very plausible principles of axiology and decision theory.
2020
What is an Extended Simple Region? (with Michael Duncan and Kristie Miller)
In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 649-659. We propose a novel view about what could make a spatial region extended (that is, bigger than a point), and investigate some consequences of this view.
Other works
2024
LF: a Foundational Higher-Order Logic (with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri)
We present and motivate the language and rules of the formal system LF as well as some basic facts about the system.
2023
Unbounded Utility
Dissertation at the University of Southern California. Addresses technical problems for the thesis of unbounded utility in decision theory.
Website last updated September 2024.
