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

 Alison Fernandes

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

I recently completed a manuscript, The Temporal Asymmetry of Causation, exploring recent empirical attempts to explain why causes come before their effects. The book focuses on statistical-mechanical, agency and fork asymmetry accounts and how to reconcile these programs. The manuscript has been submitted to the Cambridge University Press Elements in the Philosophy of Physics series.

More generally, my work explores how features of agents can be used to account for objective scientific relations, explain their temporal features, and reconcile them with the picture of the world presented by fundamental physics. Topics of my recent papers include defences of non-Humean accounts of chance, how to evaluate counterfactuals in the context of time travel and why we have different attitudes towards the past and future.

I completed a Philosophy PhD at Columbia University with a dissertation 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.