This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to almost every area of analytic philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, and set the agenda for various debates in these areas which carry on to this day. In several respects he remains a contemporary figure, yet enough time has now passed for historians of philosophy to begin to study his place in twentieth (...) century thought. His philosophy was constructed and refined not just through his published writing, but also crucially through his life-long correspondence with fellow philosophers, including leading figures such as D.M. Armstrong, Saul Kripke, W.V. Quine, J.J.C. Smart, and Peter van Inwagen. His letters formed the undercurrent of his published work and became the medium through which he proposed many of his well-known theories and discussed a range of philosophical topics in depth. A selection of his vast correspondence over a 40-year period is presented here across two volumes. The letters offer an organic story of the origins, development, breadth, and depth of his philosophy in its historical context, as well as a glimpse into the influence of his many interlocutors."-- OCLC OLUC. (shrink)

Henderson and Horgan set out a broad new approach to epistemology. They defend the roles of the a priori and conceptual analysis, but with an essential empirical dimension. 'Transglobal reliability' is the key to epistemic justification. The question of which cognitive processes are reliable depends on contingent facts about human capacities.

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

This paper seeks to reconstruct the role of schooling in a moment of accelerated social, political, economic, geo-political, climatic, indeed planetary crisis. It identifies the school as a potentially prefigurative institution, an evolutionary social frontier, capable of nurturing the democratic social character, a form of sensibility apart from which authentic political democracy is not possible. As theorized by Herbert Marcuse and Richard Hart and Antonio Negri, the “new sensibility” or “multitude” is characterized by greater psychological freedom, individuality, social creativity and (...) self-rule, comprising a “whole of singularities” that “acts in common”. It suggests a human subject with a vital, biological drive for liberation, with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of a society based on hierarchy and domination, and is associated politically with democracy and social-anarchism, or what Murray Bookchin called “communalism”. This paper identifies three main characteristics of an institution informed by this form of modal subjectivity, all of them based on student-teacher dialogue: an emergent, project-based curriculum, whole-school direct democratic governance on all levels of the community, and the regular practice of communal philosophical inquiry, through which we problematize the concepts we live by, in the interest of their ongoing reconstruction. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 13, Issue 1, Page 128-141, January 2021.

In his note "can there be vague objects?" ("analysis", 1978), Gareth evans presents a purported proof that there can be no vague identity statements. Some readers think that evans endorses the proof and its false conclusion. Not so. His point is that those who put vagueness in the world, Rather than in language, Will have no way to fault the proof and no way to escape the false conclusion.

In Empirical Realism David K. Clark asks, simply: is there a moral structure to the universe?

Common formulations of the principle of charity in translation seem to undermine attributions of irrationality in social scientific accounts that are otherwise unexceptionable. This I call the problem of irrationality. Here I resolve the problem of irrationality by developing two complementary views of the principle of charity. First, I develop the view (ill-developed in the literature at present) that the principle of charity is preparatory, being needed in the construction of provisional first-approximation translation manuals. These serve as the basis for (...) explanatory accounts and associated refinements in the translation manual. In developing such explanatory accounts, the principle of charity is no longer constraining. Thus, the principle of charity applies only in the early stages of constructing translation manuals, and there is no problem of irrationality in the later stages of constructing translation manuals. Second, I reduce the principle of charity, where it does apply, to a special case of what I call the principle of explicability: so translate as to attribute explicable beliefs and practices to the speakers of the source-language. I show that the appropriate formulation of the principle of charity counsels just what the principle of explicability requires in the early stages of social scientific investigation. (shrink)

W.D. Ross was the most important opponent of utilitarianism and consequentialism in British moral philosophy between 1861 and 1939. In Rossian Ethics, David Phillips offers the first monograph devoted exclusively to Ross's seminal contribution to moral philosophy. The book has two connected aims. The first is to interpret and evaluate Ross's moral theory. The second is to articulate a distinctive view intermediate between consequentialism and absolutist deontology, which Phillips calls "classical deontology.".

This article investigates and provides guidelines to the negative impact of mahadi on the Basotho youth before they may marry. It is important to note that marriage is one of the main parts of the life cycle amongst the Basotho and not only joins a man and a woman together, but is also considered to unite the members of the respective families of the married couple into one family. This union of two families comes into effect when the process of (...) negotiation of the mahadi is initiated. The negotiation for mahadi is, in other words, the first stage of bonding two families together. In the hope of gaining a better understanding and results, the writer searched for a qualitative method to conduct the research. (shrink)

It is advisable to treat some sorts of discourse about fiction with the aid of an intensional operator "in such-And-Such fiction...." the operator may appear either explicitly or tacitly. It may be analyzed in terms of similarity of worlds, As follows: "in the fiction f, A" means that a is true in those of the worlds where f is told as known fact rather than fiction that differ least from our world, Or from the belief worlds of the community in (...) which the fiction originated. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to Lewis's work in ethics and social philosophy. Topics covered include the logic of obligation and permission; decision theory and its relation to the idea that beliefs might play the motivating role of desires; a subjectivist analysis of value; dilemmas in virtue ethics; the problem of evil; problems about self-prediction; social coordination, linguistic and otherwise; alleged duties to rescue distant strangers; toleration as a tacit treaty; nuclear warfare; and punishment. This collection, and the two preceding volumes, (...) will disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher. (shrink)

Narrative form is crucial to the understanding of science in popular culture. This is particularly true with subjects such as radiation, in which the technical details at hand are often remote from everyday experience—as well as contested or uncertain among experts. This article examines the narrative choices made by three popular texts that publicized radiation risks to the public during the Cold War: John Hersey's Hiroshima, David Bradley's No Place to Hide, and Ralph Lapp's The Voyage of the Lucky (...) Dragon. It contends that each author borrowed from well-established literary genres and that this borrowing was crucial to coherence and effective messaging of the argument. At the same time, placing the arguments in such a familiar form served to blunt some of the radical potential in those same messages. (shrink)

In re-examining the concepts of desire, intention, and trying, David K. Chan brings a fresh approach toward resolving many of the problems that have occupied philosophers of action for almost a century. This book not only presents a complete theory of human agency but also, by developing the conceptual tools needed to do moral philosophy, lays the groundwork for formulating an ethics that is rooted in a clear, intuitive, and coherent moral psychology.

This volume is devoted to Lewis's work in metaphysics and epistemology. Topics covered include properties, ontology, possibility, truthmaking, probability, the mind-body problem, vision, belief, and knowledge. The purpose of this collection, and the volumes that precede and follow it, is to disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher. The volume will serve as a useful work of reference for teachers and students of philosophy.

Despite criticism that dignity is a vague and slippery concept, a number of international guidelines on bioethics have cautioned against research that is contrary to human dignity, with reference specifically to genetic technology. What is the connection between genetic research and human dignity? In this article, I investigate the concept of human dignity in its various historical forms, and examine its status as a moral concept. Unlike Kant's ideal concept of human dignity, the empirical or relational concept takes human dignity (...) as something that is affected by one's circumstances and what others do. I argue that the dignity objection to some forms of genetic research rests on a view of human nature that gives humans a special status in nature – one that is threatened by the potential of genetic research to reduce individuals to their genetic endowment. I distinguish two main philosophical accounts of human nature. One of these, the Aristotelian view, is compatible with the use of genetic technology to help humans realize their inherent potential to a fuller extent. (shrink)