Professor Alastair Wilson BA, BPhil, DPhil (Oxon)

• BA in Physics & Philosophy (Oxford, 2005)
• BPhil in Philosophy (Oxford, 2007)
• DPhil in Philosophy (Oxford, 2011)

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.

I'm currently teaching Early Modern Philosophy and Elements of Logic and Metaphysics to second year undergraduates, and Philosophy of Science to third years.

Prof Wilson has particular interests in the following topics:

Causation
Chance
Counterfactuals
Disagreement
Dispositions
Everettian Quantum Mechanics
Fundamentality
Grounding
Modality
Self-locating belief
Space and time

Prof Wilson is happy to supervise or co-supervise graduates in most areas of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of physics.

Find out more - our PhD Philosophy  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

• 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.