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Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri

Senior Research Fellow

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri works in logic, broadly construed. Most of his work involves either the application of formal methods to topics in philosophy or the development of methods for the formalization of scientific (including philosophical) reasoning. Examples of the former include the books Narrow Content (Oxford University Press, 2018; co-authored with John Hawthorne) and The Bounds of Possibility: Puzzles of Modal Variation (Oxford University Press, 2021; co-authored with Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne). An example of the latter is the book Logical Foundations (in preparation, co-authored with Zachary Goodsell), which introduces a new system of formal logic and illustrates its applications to the formalization and unification theories across a variety of sciences.

Dr Yli-Vakkuri received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2012. Before coming to ACU, he worked at the University of Oslo, Bielefeld University, and the University of Tartu.

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Books

• The Bounds of Possibility: Puzzles of Modal Variation (with Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Narrow Content (with John Hawthorne). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Williamson on Modality (edited, with Mark McCullagh). London: Routledge, 2017.

Articles

• "Rigid Designation?", forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives.
• "Unknowable Truths", forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy (with Zachary Goodsell and John Hawthorne).
• "LF: a Foundational Higher-Order Logic", arXiv:2401.11050 [math.LO], 2024 (with Zachary Goodsell).
• "Counterpart Theory and Counterfactuals", Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 13 (2023) (with John Hawthorne).
• "Intensionalism and Propositional Attitudes", Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 2 (2022) (with John Hawthorne).
• "Being in a Position to Know", Philosophical Studies, published online 30 August 2021 (with John Hawthorne).
• "The Necessity of Mathematics", Noûs, published online-first, 17 September 2018 (with John Hawthorne).
• "Operator Arguments Revisited", Philosophical Studies, Vol. 176 (2019), pp. 2933-2959 (with John Hawthorne and Peter Fritz).
• "Semantic Externalism without Thought Experiments", Analysis, Vol. 78 (2018), pp. 81-89.
• "Vagueness and Modality", Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 30 (2016), pp. 229-269 (with Jon Litland).
• "Epistemicism and Modality", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 46, Nos. 4-5 (2016), pp. 803-835.
• "Propositions and Compositionality", Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 27 (2013), pp. 526-563.

Appointments and affiliations

• Professor of Philosophy of Language, University of Tartu, 2018-2020.
• Associate Faculty Member, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, 2018-2019.
• Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Bielefeld University, 2016-2018
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, 2012-2015