Our people

Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri

Senior Research Fellow

Areas of expertise: philosophy of language; philosophy of mind; metaphysics; epistemology

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6929-0913

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri works in logic as well as in metaphysics and epistemology, broadly construed. He has previously worked on vagueness, internalism vs. externalism about mental content, and the metaphysics of modality. He currently works on the foundations of logic and semantics, and on automated reasoning. In Logical Foundations (in progress, co-authored with Zachary Goodsell), he introduces a new system of logic, LF, and motivates it by displaying its applications to topics commonly classified as metaphysical (but which, he argues, are part of pure logic), to the foundations of mathematics, the foundations of metamathematics, including the theory of computability, and the foundations of semantics. In “Defining Meaning” (in progress, co-authored with Zachary Goodsell), he argues that semantics is reducible to syntax.

Dr Yli-Vakkuri received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA, and his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2012. He has worked at the University of Oslo, Bielefeld University, and the University of Tartu, where he held the position of Professor of Philosophy of Language.

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Selected publications

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.

Articles

• “Counterpart Theory and Counterfactuals”, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 13 (2023), pp. 129–165 (with John Hawthorne).
• “Intensionalism and Propositional Attitudes”, Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 2 (2022), pp. 114–174 (with John Hawthorne).
• “Being in a Position to Know”, Philosophical Studies, Vol. 179 (2022), pp. 1323–1339 (with John Hawthorne).
• “The Necessity of Mathematics”, Noûs, Vol. 54 (2020), pp. 549–477 (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).

Appointments and affiliations

• Professor of Philosophy of Language, University of Tartu, 2018-2020
• 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