YTL Centre Annual Lecture 2026: L.A. Paul

YTL Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to announce that L.A. Paul, the Millstone Family Professor at Yale University will deliver the YTL Annual Lecture 2026.

The paradox of transformation.

Transformative changes happen. They can be chosen or unchosen, wanted or unwanted, good or bad. They can occur as part of ordinary life transitions, as when one becomes a parent, marries, emigrates, or divorces, and they can occur in extraordinary circumstances, such as when one experiences a war, a serious physical accident, an invasive neurosurgical procedure, or cognitive change due to Alzheimer’s. I will develop a conceptual framework that characterizes the profound and paradoxical nature of the epistemic and personal transformation that transformative experience can bring, and explore some of the formal implications for models of decision and change.

L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University and leads the Philosophical and Computational Foundations of Cognition Initiative for Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision-making, and the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause, and experience.

She is the author of three books, including Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Causation: A User’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2013), which in 2014 was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. In 2020 she received the Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa Society. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University and in 2023 she received a Research Award, for academic achievement, from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

In 2024 she was profiled in The New Yorker by Alice Gregory. Her work on transformative experience has also been covered in major media venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, NPR, and the BBC, and explored artistically, in "The Missing Shade of You", a dance and spoken word performance by the Logos Dance Collective, performed in New York City in 2017, in the documentary film “Comfort Zone”, about off-piste/extreme skiing in Scotland, on the Sam Harris podcast, and as the defining theme of the 2022 contemporary art fair Artissima, in Turin, Italy. She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.

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Host or Publisher Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy & Law