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 logic for a Language of Thought (LoT), implementing this semantics in the model-checker which I developed in support of this project. The LoT currently includes counterfactual conditionals, causal, constitutive explanatory, relevance, circumstantial modal, tense operators, and extensional operators with many more in the works. See software for further details.

Contact: brastmck [at] mit [dot] edu