Alastair Wilson

After completing undergraduate and graduate studies at various Oxford colleges, I spent a year and a half in Australia as a post-doc at Monash University, before joining Birmingham in 2012. My doctoral thesis was on the metaphysics of Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics, and this line of thought culminated in my 2020 book The Nature of Contingency. More recently I have worked on explanation and dependence in physics and metaphysics as part of my ERC-funded project FraMEPhys, with a book manuscript in progress on metaphysical explanation in physics. I have also worked on laws of nature, chance, properties, causation, counterfactuals, and the epistemology of disagreement and of self-locating beliefs. I was President of the Society for Metaphysics of Science in 2017-18 and Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in 2018-19. I remain on the SMS and BSPS committees, and am also a member of the climate task force of the Philosophy of Science Association and a Trustee of the Philosophy of Physics Association. I am Philpapers editor for the categories 'Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics' and 'Theories of Modality', and a managing editor of the open-access journal Ergo.

• A video talk on "Quantum Metaphysics", recorded at a joint meeting of the Edinburgh PhilSoc and PhysSoc, November 2020.
• A video talk on "Substantive Discovery in Naturalistic Modal Metaphysics", recorded at a workshop of the MetaScience project, September 2020.
• A video interview on the main themes of my book The Nature of Contingency, with Siddharth Krishnan as part of his Natural Philosophers series, September 2020.
• A video talk on "Plenitude and Recombination", recorded at a conference on David Lewis at the University of Manchester, June 2019.
• Audio recording with accompanying slides of a presentation entitled "Counterpossible Reasoning in Physics", recorded at the FraMEPhys workshop on Grounding and the Laws of Nature in Birmingham, June 2018.
• A video of a presentation entitled "Emergent Contingency", recorded at the Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Debates series at the University of Edinburgh in 2016.
• A video of a talk entitled "Emergent Spacetime: Grounded or Caused", recorded at the Beyond Spacetime project at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2016.
• A video of a presentation entitled "Metaphysical Causation", recorded at a workshop on Grounding at the University of Edinburgh in 2015."
• A video of a presentation entitled 'Quantum Mechanics and the Metaphysics of Many Worlds'. This was recorded at the 2012 PhysPhil conference at the University of St Andrews.
• A podcast of talk entitled 'Quidditism and Modal Methodology' given at the Power Structuralism Research Seminar in Oxford on January 16th 2013.