Department of Philosophy
Room 5009
Arts Building
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland

 Alison Fernandes

Hi. I'm an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin). I work in metaphysics and philosophy of science, with a particular focus on temporal asymmetries, physics and agency.

My work explores how features of agents can be used to pick out objective scientific relations, explain their temporal features, and reconcile them with the picture of the world presented by fundamental physics. I'm currently working on a book project that develops a pragmatist approach to the ontology of fundamental physics. I aim to show how we can accept primitive modalities without presupposing causal and temporal asymmetries. I also work on temporal asymmetries of causation and chance, how to evaluate counterfactuals in the context of time travel, and why we value past and future events differently.

I completed a Philosophy PhD at Columbia University with a dissertation entitled    A Deliberative Account of Causation. Here I argued we should make sense of causation by thinking about its relevance for decision-making. In 2017-2018 I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick on an interdisciplinary AHRC project: 'Time: Between Metaphysics and Psychology', led by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack. In 2016-2017 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh.

I am currently co-director of  The Irish Society for the Philosophy of Time, with Daniel Deasy.

You can find abstracts of my research, links to media, details of my teaching and my CV. You can also find my guide to applying to graduate programs and other advice.