I completed my B.Phil and D.Phil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and I am currently the Stalnaker Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. My areas of interest include formal and philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the history of modern logic. My D.Phil thesis developed a logic and semantics for essence and ground which I take to 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 focuses on developing hyperintensional semantic theories and the corresponding logics for: (1) constitutive, causal, and normative forms of explanation; (2) counterfactual and indicative conditionals; (3) tense and various types of modal operators; and (4) relevance, logical substraction, and subject-matter. These projects are motivated by applications in formal verification, AI interpretability, and AI alignment. See my research for further details.

Contact: brastmck [at] mit [dot] edu