About me

I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fairfax Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College.

My main areas of research are metaphysics, ethics and legal philosophy, but I also have interests in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Click here for details of published and forthcoming work.

You can get in touch with me at alexander.kaiserman@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Research

Articles

  1. Moore on Degrees of Responsibility, Criminal Law and Philosophy 18, 151-166 (2024). Written for a symposium on Michael Moore's book Mechanical Choices.
  2. Responsibility and Iterated Knowledge, Philosophical Issues 33(1), 83-94 (2023). Defends an iterated knowledge condition on responsibility for outcomes.
  3. Responsibility and Causation, in M. Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility (2023). Defends the idea that you're only responsible for what you cause.
  4. What's Wrong With Prepunishment?, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104(3), 622-645 (2023). The short answer: nothing.
  5. The Logic of Past-Alteration, in K. Bennett and D. W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 13 (2023). Develops a novel account of what it would mean to change the past (or for that matter, the future).
  6. Alternative Possibilities in Context, Inquiry 65(10), 1308-1324 (2022). A (pessimistic) assessment of attempts to reconcile the PAP with our intuitions in Frankfurt cases by exploiting the context-sensitivity of 'could have done otherwise'.
  7. Reasons-Sensitivity and Degrees of Free Will, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103(3), 687-709 (2021). A development of the idea that reasons-sensitivity and free will come in degrees.
  8. Against Accomplice Liability, in J. Gardner, L. Green & B. Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 4, Oxford: OUP (2021). Argues against accomplice liability and for a very different way of criminalising those who help or encourage others to commit crimes.
  9. Responsibility and the 'Pie Fallacy', Philosophical Studies 178(11), 3597-3616 (2021). On the fallacy of thinking there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be divided among those who are responsible for it.
  10. Causal Contribution in War (with Helen Beebee), Journal of Applied Philosophy 37(3), 364-377 (2020). **Winner of the JAP Best Article Prize** An assessment of recent attempts to limit liability to defensive attack in war that appeal to the concept of degrees of causal contribution.
  11. Interventionism and Mental Surgery, Erkenntnis 85(4), 919-935 (2020). A response to John Campbell's claim that the interventionist account of causation must be amended if it is to be applied to causation in psychology.
  12. Stage Theory and the Personite Problem, Analysis 79(2), 215-222 (2019). A response to Mark Johnston's claim that four dimensionalist theories of persistence have disastrous consequences for ethics.
  13. 'More of a Cause': Recent Work on Degrees of Causation and Responsibility, Philosophy Compass 13(7), e12498 (2018). A review article on degrees of causation.
  14. Partial Liability, Legal Theory 23(1), 1-26 (2017). Argues that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss.
  15. Causes and Counterparts, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95(1), 17-28 (2017). An attempt to combine David Lewis's counterpart-theoretic approach to de re modality with his counterfactual theory of causation.
  16. Necessary Connections in Context, Erkenntnis 82(1), 45-64 (2017). An attempt to combine the idea that causes necessitate their effects with Angelika Kratzer's semantics of modality.
  17. Causal Contribution, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116(3), 387-394 (2016). An explanation and defence of the claim that causal contribution comes in degrees.

Reviews

  1. Why Free Will is Real, by Christian List (with Daniel Kodsi), Mind 130(519), 987-996 (2021).
  2. Causation and Free Will, by Carolina Sartorio (with Daniel Kodsi), Criminal Law and Philosophy 13, 551-559 (2019).
  3. Proof of Causation in Tort Law, by Sandy Steel, The Cambridge Law Journal 75(3), 641-644 (2016).

In Progress

  • A paper on causal proportionality
  • A paper on New Zeno cases

Drafts available on request.

Teaching

I've taught and lectured in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of law, philosophy of science, and early modern philosophy.

Some recent graduate class syllabi:

Links

Curriculum vitae

Click here to download a copy of my CV.