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 book, The Temporal Asymmetry of Causation, in the Cambridge University Press series Elements in the Philosophy of Physics. (Available for free download until 7 June 2023.) The book examines recent empirical accounts of why causes come before their effects, including statistical-mechanical, agency and fork asymmetry accounts, as well as how to reconcile these programs.

My next book project, The Possibilities of Science, examines the function of scientific relations, including laws, chances, causation and counterfactuals, and use their roles to develop accounts of these relations.

More generally, my work explores how the needs of agents can be used to account for 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 a defences of non-Humean accounts of chance, a reappraisal of Reichenbach's explanations of temporal asymmetries and how to evaluate counterfactuals in the context of time travel.

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.