Zachary William Lee Goodsell [Bio]

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National University of Singapore · [email protected]

[PhilPeople] [Google Scholar] [CV] [Workshop 2025]

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.

My philosophical interests include logic, decision theory, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, mathematics, language, and artificial intelligence.

Publications [expand]

  • 2026
    Unknowable Truths (with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne)
    Journal of Philosophy 123 (2): 77–101
    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.
    [PhilPapers]
  • Symmetries of Value
    Noûs 60: 16–37
    Proposes the invariance of the ranking of prospects under positive affine transformations of utility, and the reversal of the ranking under negative affine transformations.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 2025
    A Categorical Theory of Truth (with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri)
    Language, Truth, and Reality pp. 49–58
    Proposes a theory of truth that entails the Tarskian definition of truth is correct.
    [PhilPapers]
  • Evaluates alleged consequences of the paradoxes of measure in the philosophy of probability.
    [PhilPapers]
  • Morality Does Not Encroach (with John Hawthorne)
    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.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 2024
    Arithmetic is Necessary
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 53: 1145–1159
    Establishes the noncontingency of arithmetical sentences from weaker assumptions than Arithmetic is Determinate.
    [PhilPapers]
  • Decision Theory Unbound
    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.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 2022
    Tossing Morgenbesser's Coin
    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.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 2021
    Arithmetic is Determinate
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 51: 127–150
    Arithmetical truths are shown to be determinately true in a minimal plural modal logic for determinacy.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 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.
    [PhilPapers]
  • 2020
    What is an Extended Simple Region? (with Michael Duncan and Kristie Miller)
    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.
    [PhilPapers]

Other Works [expand]

Events [expand]

  • 2026
    Higher-Order Metaphysics Workshop, Johns Hopkins University (September)
    “Possibility in Intuitionistic Higher-Order Logic”
  • Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, University of California, Berkeley (September)
    “Mathematical Contingency”
  • Society for Social Choice and Welfare, University of Tokyo (June)
    “Unbounded Utility and Background Risk”
  • 2025
    New York University Technical Support Group (November)
    “Intuitionism and Possibility”
  • Higher-Order Metaphysics Workshop, New York University (November)
    “Mathematical Contingency”
  • Third Hong Kong Metaphysics Conference, Lingnan University (August)
    “Intuitionism and Possibility”
  • Problems for Bayesianism Workshop, NUS (August)
    “Knowledge and Assertion”
  • Peking University (July)
    Lectures on Higher-Order Logic (guest lectures)
  • Beijing International Summer Workshop on Formal Philosophy (July)
    “Intuitionism and Possibility”
  • Formal Epistemology Workshop 2025, University of Iceland (May)
    “Symmetries of Value”
  • Princeton University (February)
    “Intensionality in the Formalization of Science”
  • 2024
    New York University (December)
    “Semantic Signals”
  • Second Hong Kong Metaphysics Conference, Lingnan University (November)
    “Mathematical Logicism”
  • Formal Epistemology Workshop 2024, Australian National University
    Comment on “Local Deference and Multiple Experts” by Zhen Ma
  • Workshop on Completeness and Incompleteness of Preference and Value, UT Austin (January)
    “Symmetry, Probability, and Imprecise Credence” (with Jake Nebel)
  • 2023
    University of Pittsburgh, MIT, New York University, and NUS (February–March)
    “Metaphysics and the Reduction of Semantics to Syntax”
  • Foundations of Probability Seminar, New York University (February)
    “Symmetries of Value”
  • 2022
    Workshop on Fanaticism, Unboundedness, and Population Ethics, UT Austin (November)
    “Symmetries of Value”
  • 2021
    APA Pacific
    “Decision Theory Unlimited”
Website last updated August 2026.