Lecturing

Supervision

Summer School Lecturing


ESSLLI 2026

Conditional Modality

Slides: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5

This course provides an introduction to an old but neglected analysis of modality, called 'Conditional modality'. The analysis was originally developed for deontic modality (what is obligatory, permitted, should happen, and so on) in the 1950s by Alan Ross Anderson, Stig Kanger, and Risto Hilpinen, preceding the later development of Kripke semantics and Kratzer's work on modality. Since then, however, the analysis has largely been forgotten in contemporary work on modality.

The central idea is that something is obligatory just in case if it does not happen, the rules have been broken, while something is permitted just in case if it does happen, the rules have not been broken. Thus the analysis puts conditionals at the core of modal concepts. As we will see, this analysis can be generalised to all modal flavours, such as epistemic modals.

A central focus of the course is to compare conditional approaches to modality with the standard treatment, such as Kripke semantics and Angelika Kratzer's work. Among the phenomena we cover are failures of Inheritance (the principle that necessity and possibility are closed under logical consequence), free choice (the failure of the inference from 'Possible A' to 'Possible(A or B)'), and the role of context dependence in modal statements.

The course provides a friendly introduction to standard treatments of modality in formal semantics. At the same time, it goes beyond standard treatments of the topic by bringing conditional modality to the fore. The course will be accessible to students with no formal background.


2023–2024

Philosophical Foundations of Explanation

Lecturer. January 2024. Link to project website. Link to ILLC course description.

All humans by nature desire to know why things happen. Children go through a why-phase (and some, it is said, never grow out of it). We seek to explain; to be reasonable, rational animals. What principles underlie our practice of giving and interpreting explanations?

We will approach this question using tools from philosophy, logic and linguistics. In particular, we will discuss what the words 'cause' and 'because' mean, and what information we take into account when we interpret them; that is, what information a causal model should contain. Along the way we will discuss new developments in the semantics of conditionals, evaluating proposals based on similarity, premise semantics, and truthmaker semantics.

Logical Analysis

Lecturer. November–December 2023. Link to course catalogue.

The goal of this course is to teach skills and knowledge that are useful for an analytical approach to philosophy. Essentially this course is about extending one's philosophical toolbox, adding tools that are regularly used in analytical approaches to philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, but also, for instance, analytical ethics. Topics include decision theory, semantic paradoxes, paradoxes of naïve set theory, ordinals and cardinals, proofs by induction, and proofs of metalogical results (e.g. soundness and completeness).

Philosophy of Language

Lecturer, co-taught with Elsbeth Brouwer. September–October 2023. Link to course catalogue.

This course provides an introduction to the contemporary analytical philosophy of language. We will discuss cognitivist, platonist and realist conceptions of meaning, and study a variety of topics, such as semantic externalism, translatability of language, communicative action and language acquisition. These subjects will be studied through primary texts of authors such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Grice, Butler, Davidson and Quine.


2022–2023

Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice

Lecturer. November–December 2022. Link to course catalogue.

In the first part of the course we study analyses of causation, both historical and contemporary. We will learn about the substantial progress researchers have recently made analysing causality. Among the questions we will consider are:


2021–2022

Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice

Guest lecturer & teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.

November–December 2021, Link to course catalogue

Philosophical Logic

Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Levin Hornisher.

November–December 2021, Link to course catalogue


2020–2021

Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice

Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.

April–May 2021, Link to course catalogue

Philosophical Logic

Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Robert van Rooij.

November-December 2020, Link to course catalogue

Topics:


2019–2020

Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice

Guest lecturer and teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.

April–May 2020, Link to course catalogue

Hypothetical Reasoning: its development and impact

Main instructor, January 2020, Link to course webpage

Four-week Master of Logic project on legal and moral applications of logic and linguistics, with a focus on hypothetical reasoning. Lectures on:

Causality & common sense reasoning

Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Robert van Rooij.

November-December 2019, Link to course catalogue. 

Syllabus:


2018-2019

Causality, Decision Making and Games

Teaching assistant (main instructors: Robert van Rooij & Shane Steinert-Threlkeld), November-December 2018, Link to course catalogue