Jessica Wilson

Jessica M. Wilson is an American professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on metaphysics, especially on the metaphysics of science and mind, the epistemologies of skepticism, a priori deliberation, and necessity. Wilson was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for excellence in philosophical thought by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association.

Education and career Wilson received her baccalaureate summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 1987, before starting a doctorate program in philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1994, and eventually receiving her doctorate in philosophy from Cornell University in 2001. From 2014 to 2016, Wilson held a simultaneous appointment as a Regular Distinguished Visiting professor at the Eidyn Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Wilson also argues that a nontrivial version of physicalism must be defined to exclude fundamental mental entities. Wilson's 2021 book, Metaphysical Emergence, published by Oxford University Press, was positively reviewed in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Wilson's criticism of 'Grounding', understood as a generic relation of metaphysical dependence, problematizes a notion that has recently occupied center stage in metaphysics. Wilson argues that examples of "the 'small-g' grounding relations" such as "token identity, realization, the classical extensional part-whole relation, the set membership relation, the proper subset relation, and the determinable-determinate relation" are "a heterogeneous lot" which "counts against the idea there is a distinctive coarse-grained metaphysical relation that is the unifying element concerning these relations—for what real unity do they display?"

Wilson invokes the determinable-determinate relation in the service of a novel account of metaphysical indeterminacy, in terms of an object's possessing a determinable property without possessing any unique determinate property by which that determinable might be determined. Wilson defends the superiority of the account over its competitors in various domains, including the indeterminacy of the spatial boundaries of material objects, and the indeterminacy among superposed properties postulated by quantum mechanics.