I work in formal and philosophical logic, maintaining interests in the history of modern logic and the philosophy of mathematics. My work is motivated by applications in AI reasoning and formal verification.

I am currently the Stalnaker Postdoctoral Associate at MIT having previously completed my B.Phil and D.Phil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. In my D.Phil thesis I developed a logic and hyperintensional semantics for essence and ground which regiment constitutive explanatory readings of ‘necessary for’ and ‘sufficient for’, respectively. My thesis was supervised by Tim Williamson and James Studd and examined by Kit Fine (external) and Ofra Magidor (internal).

My current research develops a unified hyperintensional semantics and corresponding logic for counterfactual conditional, causal, constitutive explanatory, circumstantial modal, and tense operators. In order to efficiently prototype semantic clauses, I developed the model-checker which supports a programmatic methodology in semantics. See software for further details.

Contact: brastmck [at] mit [dot] edu