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.

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 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.

Refutes the methodological separatists who hold that the logic of explanation and testing in the human sciences is fundamentally different than in the natural sciences, and develops complementary accounts for interpretation and explanation, ...

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)

This is the first of a three-volume collection of David Lewis's most recent papers in all the areas to which he has made significant contributions. The purpose of this collection (and the two volumes to follow) is to disseminate even more widely the work of a preeminent and influential late twentieth-century philosopher. The papers are now offered in a readily accessible format. This first volume is devoted to Lewis's work on philosophical logic from the last twenty-five years. The topics (...) covered include: deploying the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalised languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalised philosophical systems. The volume will serve as an important reference tool for all philosophers and their students. (shrink)

A solution to the problem of intrinsic change for enduring things should meet three conditions. It should not replace monadic intrinsic properties by relations. It should not replace the having simpliciter of properties by standing in some relation to them. It should not rely on an unexplained notion of having an intrinsic property at a time. Johnston's solution satisfies the first condition at the expense of the second. Haslanger's solution satisfies the first and second at the expense of the third.

What knowledge would suffice to yield an interpretation of an arbitrary utterance of a language when such knowledge is based on evidence plausibly available to a nonspeaker of that language? it is argued that it is enough to know a theory of truth for the language and that the theory satisfies tarski's 'convention t' and that it gives an optimal fit to data about sentences held true, Under specified conditions, By native speakers.

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

I evaluate one intuitive argument for, and one against, the use of lethal drones by the United States in its War on Terror. The Lesser Evil Argument appeals to those who think it perverse to reject weapons that enable a more limited use of force. But if harms on all sides and longer-term consequences are considered, the argument is much less persuasive. The Targeted Killing Argument is intuitive to those who consider drone strikes against terrorist suspects named in intelligence reports (...) to violate the rules of war. I reject the claim that it would be acceptable to carry out targeted killings because of necessity. Finally, I consider how radical asymmetry encourages terrorism against civilians, and how drone operators have the status of executioners, not warriors. (shrink)

The landscape of graduate science education is changing as efforts to diversify the professoriate have increased because academic faculty jobs at universities have grown scarce and more competitive. With this context as a backdrop, the present research examines the perceptions and career goals of advisors and advisees through surveys of PhD students and faculty mentors in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. Study 1 examined actual preferences and career goals of PhD students among three options: research careers, teaching careers, and (...) non-academic careers in industry, and compared the actual preferences of students with what they perceived as being the normative preferences of faculty. Overall, students had mixed preferences but perceived that their advisors had a strong normative preference for research careers for them. Moreover, students who ranked research positions as most desirable felt the most belonging in their academic departments. Further analyses revealed no differences in career preferences as a function of underrepresented minority student status or first-generation status, but URM and FG students felt less belonging in their academic departments. Study 2 examined faculty preferences for different careers for their advisees, both in general and for current students in particular. While faculty advisors preferred students to go into research in general, when focusing on specific students, they saw their preferences as being closely aligned with the career preference of each PhD student. Faculty advisors did not perceive any difference in belonging between their students as a function of their URM status. Discrepancies between student and faculty perceptions may occur, in part, because faculty and students do not engage in sufficient discussions about the wider range of career options beyond academic research. Supporting this possibility, PhD students and faculty advisors reported feeling more comfortable discussing research careers with each other than either non-academic industry positions or teaching positions. Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for interpersonal and institutional efforts to foster diversity in the professoriate and to create open communication about career development. (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 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)

The mammalian blastocyst exhibits a high capacity for aerobic glycolysis, a metabolic characteristic of tumours. It has been considered that aerobic glycolysis is a means to ensure a high carbon flux to fulfil biosynthetic demands. Here, alternative explanations for this pattern of metabolism are considered. Lactate creates a microenvironment of low pH around the embryo to assist the disaggregation of uterine tissues to facilitate trophoblast invasion. Further it is proposed that lactate acts as a signalling molecule (especially at the reduced (...) oxygen tension present at implantation) to elicit bioactive VEGF recruitment from uterine cells, to promote angiogenesis. Finally it is suggested that the region of high lactate/low pH created by the blastocyst modulates the activity of the local immune response, helping to create immune tolerance. Consequently, the mammalian blastocyst offers a model to study the role of microenvironments, and how metabolites and pH are used in signalling. (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)

Yoshida considers two broad understandings of how social scientists can and should “describe and explain other cultures or their aspects under concepts of rationality” . In the one corner is a family of approaches that Yoshida finds deeply flawed: cultural interpretivist approaches. Five authors representative of this family are given fine chapter length examinations: Winch, Taylor, Geertz, Sahlins, and Obeyesekere. In the other corner is Yoshida’s favored approach: critical rationalism. This approach is associated with the intellectual descendants of Karl Popper—notably (...) Jarvie and Agassi. It is presented in outline and treated as the clear winner. By virtue of not having the defects that are diagnosed in the interpretivist approaches, critical rationalism is presented as the fitting approach in the social sciences. This dialectical structure has two notable weaknesses: First, showing that one item, A, lacks the problems found in another item, B, should not be take .. (shrink)