Results for 'Sellars, modality, metaphysics, possible worlds, Thomasson, Lewis, Brandom'

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  1. Modal Structure and Sellars' Metaphysical Methodology.Catherine Legg & Aiden Meyer - 2024 - In Krisztián Pete & László Kocsis, Wilfrid Sellars’ Images and the Philosophy in Between: Nature and Norms in a Stereoscopic View. London: Bloomsbury.
    Wilfrid Sellars’ distinctive scientific realism has lately been gaining ground, but a crucial issue is how it can or should theorize modality. We argue that many interesting questions in this area transcend the usual ‘first-order’ concerns: “Is there an objectivist modal ontology?” and “What modal entities should we posit”? Rather, Sellars invites us to take a fresh look at the relationship between logic and metaphysics through an investigation of ‘second-order’ philosophical categories. This investigation contrasts with both the first-order 'external' ontologising (...)
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  2. Primitive modality and possible worlds.Javier Kalhat - 2008 - Philosophy 83 (4):497-517.
    This paper sets out a number of reasons for thinking that the framework of possible worlds, even when construed non-reductively, does not provide an adequate basis for an explanation of modality. I first consider a non-reductive version of Lewis' modal realism, and then move on to consider the ersatzist approach of Plantinga et al. My main complaint is that the framework of possible worlds gets the semantics and metaphysics of ordinary modal discourse wrong. That is, possible worlds (...)
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  3. Possible worlds I: Modal realism.Louis DeRosset - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (6):998-1008.
    It is difficult to wander far in contemporary metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has even made its way into linguistics and decision theory. What are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in these disciplines all appeal? This paper sets out and evaluates a leading contemporary theory of possible worlds, David Lewis's Modal (...)
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  4.  65
    Leibniz and Lewis on Modal Metaphysics and Fatalism.Chloe Armstrong - 2017 - Quaestiones Disputatae 7 (2):72-96.
    Although the philosophical systems of G. W. Leibniz and David Lewis both feature possible worlds, the ways in which their systems are similar and dissimilar are ultimately surprising. At first glance, Leibniz’s modal metaphysics might strike us as one of the most contemporarily relevant aspects of his system. But I clarify in this paper major interpretive problems that result from understanding Leibniz’s system in terms of contemporary views (like Lewis’s, for instance). Specifically, I argue that Leibniz rejects the inference (...)
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  5. Actualism, Singular Propositions, and Possible Worlds: Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality.Aviv Hoffmann - 2002 - Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    My dissertation consists of three essays in the Metaphysics of Modality: In "A Puzzle about Truth and Singular Propositions," I consider two theses that seem to be true and then an argument for the conclusion that they form an inconsistent pair. One thesis is that a proposition that is singular with respect to a given object implies that the object exists. This is so because the proposition predicates something of the object. The other thesis is that some propositions are true (...)
     
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  6. Possible Worlds.John Divers - 2002 - Routledge.
    _Possible Worlds_ presents the first up-to-date and comprehensive examination of one of the most important topics in metaphysics. John Divers considers the prevalent philosophical positions, including realism, antirealism and the work of important writers on possible worlds such as David Lewis, evaluating them in detail.
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  7. (1 other version)Concrete possible worlds.Phillip Bricker - 2008 - In Theodore Sider, John P. Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman, Contemporary debates in metaphysics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 111--134.
    In this chapter, I survey what I call Lewisian approaches to modality: approaches that analyze modality in terms of concrete possible worlds and their parts. I take the following four theses to be characteristic of Lewisian approaches to modality. (1) There is no primitive modality. (2) There exists a plurality of concrete possible worlds. (3) Actuality is an indexical concept. (4) Modality de re is to be analyzed in terms of counterparts, not transworld identity. After an introductory section (...)
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  8. Spread Worlds, Plenitude and Modal Realism: A Problem for David Lewis.Charles Pigden & Rebecca E. B. Entwisle - 2012 - In James Maclaurin, Rationis Defensor: Essays in Honour of Colin Cheyne. Springer.
    In his metaphysical summa of 1986, The Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis famously defends a doctrine he calls ‘modal realism’, the idea that to account for the fact that some things are possible and some things are necessary we must postulate an infinity possible worlds, concrete entities like our own universe, but cut off from us in space and time. Possible worlds are required to account for the facts of modality without assuming that modality is primitive – (...)
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  9. Modal Metaphysics.Ted Parent - 2011 - In James Fieser & Bradley Dowden, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge.
    This summarizes of some prominent views about the metaphysics of possible worlds.
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  10. Non-Descriptivism About Modality. A Brief History And Revival.Amie Thomasson - 2008 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 4:8.
    Despite the otherwise-dominant trends towards physicalism and naturalism in philosophy, it has become increasingly common for metaphysicians to accept the existence either of modal facts and properties, or of Lewisian possible worlds. This paper raises the historical question: why did these heavyweight realist views come into prominence? The answer is that they have arisen in response to the demand to find truthmakers for our modal statements. But this demand presupposes that modal statements are descriptive claims in need of truthmakers. (...)
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  11.  70
    Possible World Semantics: Philosophical Foundations.Robert Stalnaker - 2010 - In Alan Berger, Saul Kripke. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 100-115.
    Saul Kripke did more than anyone else to bring possible worlds into the contemporary philosophical discourse, first with his more formal work on the model theory for modal logic in the 1960s, and then with his more philosophical lectures on reference and modality, delivered in January 1970, that used the possible worlds apparatus informally to clarify the relations between semantic issues about names and metaphysical issues about individuals and kinds. Possible worlds semantics have been widely applied since (...)
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  12. Extending Lewisian modal metaphysics in light of Quantum Gravity.Tiziana Vistarini - 2020 - In Nick Huggett, Keizo Matsubara & Christian WĂźthrich, Beyond Spacetime: The Foundations of Quantum Gravity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..
    It has been argued within some philosophy of quantum gravity circles that endorsing Lewisian modal metaphysics is incompatible with endorsing the fundamental physical ontology of any quantum gravity theory. Speaking concisely, the unsolvable tension would be between Lewis' metaphysical commitment to the fundamentality of space and time, and the physical lesson of quantum gravity about the disappearance of space and time from the fundamental structure of the world. In this essay I argue against the idea that the tension is unsolvable. (...)
     
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  13. Branching of possible worlds.Philip Percival - 2013 - Synthese 190 (18):4261-4291.
    The question as to whether some objects are possible worlds that have an initial segment in common, i.e. so that their fusion is a temporal tree whose branches are possible worlds, arises both for those who hold that our universe has the structure of a temporal tree and for those who hold that what there is includes concrete universes of every possible variety. The notion of “possible world” employed in the question is seen to be the (...)
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  14. Modal Matters: Essays in Metaphysics.Phillip Bricker (ed.) - 2020 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    This volume contains eighteen papers, three with new postscripts, that were written over the past 35 years. Five of the papers have not been previously published. Together they provide a comprehensive account of modal reality—the realm of possible worlds—from a Humean perspective, with excursions into neighboring topics in metaphysics. Part 1 sketches an account of reality as a whole, both the mathematical and the modal, defending a form of plenitudinous realism: every consistent proposition is true of some portion of (...)
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  15.  64
    From Dispositions to Possible Worlds.Daniel Kodaj - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    Dispositions (powers, potentialities) have become popular in metaphysics in recent years, and some of their proponents are advertising them as the best metaphysical grounds for modality. This project has a logical as well as an ontological side: dispositionalists offer modal and counterfactual semantics that make no use of possible worlds. I argue that, as a result of their counterfactual semantics, dispositionalists are in fact committed to entities that play the same theoretical role as possible worlds. Roughly, the claim (...)
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  16. Norms and necessity: replies to critics.Amie L. Thomasson - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2417-2456.
    The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist (...)
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  17. Norms and Necessity.Amie L. Thomasson - 2013 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (2):143-160.
    Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we could come to know modal facts and metaphysical problems about how to place modal facts in the natural world. These problems arise from thinking of modal claims as attempts to describe modal features of this world that explain what makes them true. Here I propose a different view of modal discourse in which talk about what is “metaphysically necessary” does not aim to describe modal features of the world, (...)
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  18. David Lewis, Donald C. Williams, and the History of Metaphysics in the Twentieth Century.A. R. J. Fisher - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1):3--22.
    The revival of analytic metaphysics in the latter half of the twentieth century is typically understood as a consequence of the critiques of logical positivism, Quine’s naturalization of ontology, Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, clarifications of modal notions in logic, and the theoretical exploitation of possible worlds. However, this explanation overlooks the work of metaphysicians at the height of positivism and linguisticism that affected metaphysics of the late twentieth century. Donald C. Williams is one such philosopher. In this paper I (...)
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  19.  76
    Metaphysical Theories of Modality: Properties, Relations and Possibilities.David A. Denby - 1997 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Many theories assimilate the idioms of modality to those of quantification; they hold that so-and-so is possible iff there is a "world" at which it is true that so-and-so. "Modal realism" identifies worlds with certain concrete particulars, and truth at a world with what is true of it. Rival "ersatz" theories identify worlds with certain abstract entities and identify what is true at them with what they represent. ;David Lewis argues that pre-theoretic modal intuitions are best explained by modal (...)
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  20. David Lewis on Ways Things Might Be: An Examination of Modal Realism through Lewis’s Correspondence.A. R. J. Fisher - 2024 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 80 (4):1059-1080.
    David Lewis is widely known for maintaining the bizarre thesis known as genuine modal realism (hereafter, modal realism). He argued for modal realism on grounds of serviceability in On the Plurality of Worlds. However, earlier in Counterfactuals, he proposed a different kind of argument: from talk of ways things might be to possible worlds. In this paper, I examine the evolution of the latter argument in Lewis’s thought and evaluate its place in his overall case for modal realism, especially (...)
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  21. Sellars on modality: possible worlds and rules of inference.Sybren Heyndels - 2023 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (3):606-631.
    This paper discusses the account of alethic modality as presented by Wilfrid Sellars in his earlier work from 1947 to 1958. Its aim is twofold. First, I discuss Sellars' analysis by exploring its historical relationship to Carnap's account of modality. I argue that Carnap's early syntactic treatment of modality profoundly influenced Sellars' own so-called ‘regulist' account of modality in terms of rules of inference. Furthermore, it is suggested that Sellars' lesser-known possible worlds analysis was influenced by Carnap's later semantic (...)
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  22. Metaphysical Modality, without Possible Worlds.Giorgio Lando - 2022 - In Francesco Ademollo, Fabrizio Amerini & Vincenzo De Risi, Thinking and Calculating. Springer. pp. 385-408.
    Aim of this paper is to analyse and assess two divergent understandings of metaphysical modality. On one hand, according to the absolutist conception, metaphysical modality is the extreme variety of objective modality and can be characterised in terms of all the varieties of objective modality: for example, p is metaphysically necessary if and only if p is necessary for every variety of objective necessity. The absolutist conception can also be framed in terms of counterfactual inevitability. On the other hand, according (...)
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  23. Metaphysical accounts of modality: A comparative evaluation of Lewisian and neo-Aristotelian modal metaphysics.David Chua - unknown
    In this essay I comparatively evaluate two realist metaphysical accounts of modality: David Lewis’ (1986) genuine modal realism (GMR), and neo-Aristotelian modal realism (AMR) as put forth by Alexander Pruss (2011). GMR offers a reductive analysis of modal claims of possibility and necessity in terms of claims quantifying over concrete worlds and counterparts, and is in this way committed the existence of a plurality of concrete worlds other than the actual world; AMR, on the other hand, offers an analysis of (...)
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  24. Metaphysical and absolute possibility.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 8):1861-1872.
    It is widely alleged that metaphysical possibility is “absolute” possibility Conceivability and possibility, Clarendon, Oxford, 2002, p 16; Stalnaker, in: Stalnaker Ways a world might be: metaphysical and anti-metaphysical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp 201–215; Williamson in Can J Philos 46:453–492, 2016). Kripke calls metaphysical necessity “necessity in the highest degree”. Van Inwagen claims that if P is metaphysically possible, then it is possible “tout court. Possible simpliciter. Possible period…. possib without qualification.” And Stalnaker (...)
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  25. Modeling the Biologically Possible: Evolvability as a Modal Concept.Marcel Weber - 2025 - In Tarja Knuuttila, Till GrĂźne-Yanoff, Rami Koskinen & Ylwa Wirling, Modeling the Possible. Perspectives from Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge.
    Biological modalities, i.e., biologically possible, impossible, or necessary states of affairs have not received much attention from philosophers. Yet, it is widely agreed that there are biological constraints on physically possible states of affairs, such that not everything that is physically possible is also biologically possible, even if everything that is biologically possible is also physically possible. Furthermore, biologists use concepts that appear to be modal in nature, such as the concept of evolvability in (...)
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  26. From Modality to Millianism.Nathan Salmón - 2024 - Noûs 2024 (2024;1–22):1–22.
    A new argument is offered which proceeds through epistemic possibility (for all S knows, p), cutting a trail from modality to Millianism, the controversial thesis that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its bearer. New definitions are provided for various epistemic modal notions. A surprising theorem about epistemic necessity is proved. A proposition p can be epistemically necessary for a knowing subject S even though p is /a posteriori/ and S does not know p. The identity relation (...)
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  27. Modal realism and metaphysical nihilism.Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra - 2004 - Mind 113 (452):683-704.
    In this paper I argue that Modal Realism, the thesis that there exist non-actual possible individuals and worlds, can be made compatible with Metaphysical Nihilism, the thesis that it is possible that nothing concrete exists. Modal Realism as developed by Lewis rules out the possibility of a world where nothing concrete exists and so conflicts with Metaphysical Nihilism. In the paper I argue that Modal Realism can be modified so as to be compatible with Metaphysical Nihilism. Such a (...)
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  28. Review of possible worlds. [REVIEW]Josh Parsons - manuscript
    This book is a survey, fortified by original material, of metaphysical theories of modality set in terms of possible worlds. Those theories include what Divers calls “genuine realism”, or “GR” — this is David Lewis’s “genuine modal realism” — and what Divers calls “actualist realism”, or “AR” — this seems to be the same as what Lewis called “ersatz modal realism”, which has also become widely know as “ersatzism”. Two important kinds of theory are not included: those that treat (...)
     
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  29. Lewis' Modal Realism and Absence Causation.Joseph A. Baltimore - 2011 - Metaphysica 12 (2):117-124.
    A major criticism of David Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation is that it allows too many things to count as causes, especially since Lewis allows, in addition to events, absences to be causes as well. Peter Menzies has advanced this concern under the title “the problem of profligate causation.” In this paper, I argue that the problem of profligate causation provides resources for exposing a tension between Lewis’ acceptance of absence causation and his modal realism. The result is a different (...)
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  30. The Quinean Roots of Lewis’s Humeanism.Frederique Janssen-Lauret - 2017 - The Monist 100 (2):249-265.
    An odd dissensus between confident metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians pervades early twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Each faction is convinced their side has won the day, but both are mistaken about the philosophical legacy of the twentieth century. More historical awareness is needed to overcome the current dissensus. Lewis and his possible-world system are lionised by metaphysicians; Quine’s pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics inspire antimetaphysicians. But Lewis developed his system under the influence of his teacher Quine, inheriting from him his (...)
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  31. Lewisian Worlds and Buridanian Possibilia.Boaz Faraday Schuman - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Many things can be other than they are. Many other things cannot. But what are statements like these about? One answer to this question is that we are speaking of possible worlds: if something can be other than it is, then it actually is that way in some possible world. If something cannot be otherwise, it is not otherwise in any world. This answer is presently dominant in analytical philosophy of language and logic. What are these worlds? David (...)
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  32. David Lewis ’in Modal Realizminde Dünya-Ötesi Karşıolgusal Önermeler, İkinci-Dereceden Dünyalar ve Dünyalar-Arası Nedensellik Sorunları‘.Aret Karademir & Pakize Sandıkçıoğlu - 2009 - Felsefe Tartismalari 43:1-15.
    David Lewis is most famous in the analytical metaphysics literature for his analysis of the truth conditions of counterfactual conditionals in terms of possible worlds, and for his analysis of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals. He uses a notion of comparative similarity of possible worlds in his analysis of counterfactual conditionals. However, since he attributes reality to possible worlds he has attracted many criticisms. The aim of our paper is to present some counterfactuals whose account cannot (...)
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  33. Modal Realism and Anthropic Reasoning.Mario GĂłmez-Torrente - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):925-938.
    Some arguments against David Lewis’s modal realism seek to exploit apparent inconsistencies between it and anthropic reasoning. A recent argument, in particular, seeks to exploit an inconsistency between modal realism and typicality anthropic premises, premises common in the literature on physical multiverses, to the effect that observers who are like human observers in certain respects must be typical in the relevant multiverse. Here I argue that typicality premises are not applicable to the description of Lewis’s metaphysical multiverse, where the proportions (...)
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  34. Concrete possible worlds and counterfactual conditionals: Lewis versus Williamson on modal knowledge.Andrea Sauchelli - 2010 - Synthese 176 (3):345-359.
    The epistemology of modality is gradually coming to play a central role in general discussions about modality. This paper is a contribution in this direction, in particular I draw a comparison between Lewis’s Modal realism and Timothy Williamson’s recent account of modality in terms of counterfactual thinking. In order to have criteria of evaluation, I also formulate four requirements which are supposed to be met by any theory of modality to be epistemologically adequate.
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  35.  53
    Metaphysics: contemporary readings.Michael J. Loux (ed.) - 2008 - New York: Routledge.
    Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that draws together leading philosophers writing on the major themes in Metaphysics. Chapters appear under the headings: Universals Particulars Modality and Possible Worlds Causation Time Persistence Realism and Anti-Realism Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay by the editor which guides students gently into each topic. Articles by the following leading philosophers are included: Allaire, Anscombe, Armstrong, Black, Broad, Casullo, Dummett, Ewing, Heller, Hume, Kripke, Lewis, Mackie, McTaggart, Mellor, Merricks , Parfit, (...)
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  36. Worlds, Objects, and Theories of Fiction.Mihai Rusu - 2020 - Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philosophia:39-52.
    The main aim of this paper is to provide a critical discussion of some key issues concerning the possible-world analysis of fiction. After a review of the most important philosophical questions concerning truth, reference, names and identity, and their bearing on fiction, I outline the possible-world framework, as used by David Lewis (1978) in his analysis, and examine its most important problems. A special interest is granted to the limits of the Lewisian pretense interpretation of fiction that are (...)
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  37. The Analytic Pragmatist Conception of the A Priori: C. I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars.James O'Shea - 2017 - In Sarin Marchetti & Maria Baghramian, Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 203–227.
    ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers (...)
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  38. Primitive worlds.Takashi Yagisawa - 2002 - Acta Analytica 17 (1):19-37.
    Modal Dimensionalism is a metaphysical theory about possible worlds that is naturally suggested by the often-noted parallelism between modal logic and tense logic. It says that the universe spreads out not only in spatiotemporal dimensions but also in a modal dimension. It regards worlds as nothing more or less than indices in the modal dimension in the way analogous to the way in which Temporal Dimensionalism regards temporal points and intervals as indices in the temporal dimension. Despite its naturalness (...)
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  39.  51
    Metaphysical Compatibilism and the Ontology of Trans-World Personhood: A Neo-Lewisian Argument for the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge (Determinism) and Metaphysical Free Will.Bartlomiej Andrzej Lenart - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):385-407.
    David Lewis’ contemplations regarding divine foreknowledge and free will, along with some of his other more substantial work on modal realism and his counterpart theory can serve as a springboard to a novel solution to the foreknowledge and metaphysical freedom puzzle, namely a proposal that genuine metaphysical freedom is compatible with determinism, which is quite different from the usual compatibilist focus on the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. This paper argues that while Lewis opens the doors to such a (...)
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  40. Against Yagisawa's modal realism.Mark Jago - 2013 - Analysis 73 (1):10-17.
    In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). In this paper, I’ll present two arguments, each of which shows that Yagisawa’s metaphysics is incoherent. The first argument shows that the combination of Yagisawa’s metaphysics with impossibilia leads to triviality: every sentence whatsoever comes out true. This (...)
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  41. (1 other version)Pundits and Possibilities: Philosophers Are Not Modal Experts.Daniel Kilov & Caroline Hendy - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1):824-843.
    Wilfrid Sellars [1962: 1] described philosophy as an attempt to ‘understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. But it is distinctive of philosophy that many of us are interested not only in how the world is but in ways that it could be. That is, philosophy is concerned with facts about modality. Some of the most important arguments in philosophy hinge on modal premises, and (...)
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  42.  79
    When the actual world is not even possible.Christian WĂźthrich - unknown
    Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis's analysis of modality. As Lewis's possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime---if borne out---suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence---as opposed to the fundamentality---of spacetime must (...)
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  43.  76
    Counterpart theory: metaphysical modal normativism by another name.Kristie Miller - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1 (8):2339-2360.
    In this paper, I argue that not only is metaphysical modal normativism an attractive view but that, as a matter of fact, many of us have, all along, been metaphysical modal normativists of a particular stripe. Namely, we have been the kinds of modal normativists, in the form of counterpart theorists, who are robust realists about possibility simpliciter. Having introduced modal normativism as Thomasson does in Norms and Necessity, I go on to recast it in somewhat different terms. With this (...)
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  44. Possible Worlds for Modal Primitivists.Louis deRosset - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (1):109-131.
    Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950’s is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notion of “possible world.” I articulate three constraints on any acceptable primitivist explanation of the nature of (...)
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  45. Modality.Joseph Melia - 2003 - Chesham: Routledge.
    This introduction to modality places the emphasis on the metaphysics of modality rather than on the formal semetics of quantified modal logic. The text begins by introducing students to the "de re/de dicto" distinction, conventionalist and conceptualist theories of modality and some of the key problems in modality, particularly Quine's criticisms. It then moves on to explain how possible worlds provide a solution to many of the problems in modality and how possible worlds themselves have been used to (...)
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  46.  90
    The metaphysics of counterpart theory.Robert Kraut - 1980 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (2):150 – 157.
    The technical apparatus of modal semantics--Possible worlds, World-Lines, Counterparts, Etc.--Continues to arouse suspicion among philosophers of various persuasions. A way to dispel at least some of the suspicion is to provide a naturalistic interpretation of the semantical machinery. My goal here is precisely that. More specifically, I provide a behavioristically acceptable interpretation of david lewis' counterpart theory. Reference to worlds and counterparts is construed in sober, Quinean terms. The result is a "metalinguistic" construal of counterpart semantics, And thus, Of (...)
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  47. Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings: 2nd Edition.Michael Loux (ed.) - 2008 - Routledge.
    Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that draws together leading philosophers writing on the major themes in Metaphysics. Chapters appear under the headings: Universals Particulars Modality and Possible Worlds Causation Time Persistence Realism and Anti-Realism. Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay by the editor which guides students gently into each topic. Articles by the following leading philosophers are included: Allaire, Anscombe, Armstrong, Black, Broad, Casullo, Dummett, Ewing, Heller, Hume, Kripke, Lewis, Mackie, McTaggart, Mellor, Merricks , Parfit, (...)
     
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  48. David Lewis.Brian Weatherson - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    David Lewis (1941–2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology, meta-ethics and aesthetics. In most of these fields he is essential reading; in many of them he is among the most important figures of recent decades. And this list leaves out his two most significant contributions. -/- In philosophy of mind, Lewis developed and defended at length a new version (...)
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  49.  9
    Sellars on modality: possible worlds and rules of inference.Ireland Dublin - 2023 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (3):606-631.
    Volume 32, Issue 3, May 2024, Page 606-631.
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  50.  12
    Reply to Dana Scott, “Is There Life on Possible Worlds?”.David Lewis - 2015 - In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer, A companion to David Lewis. Chichester, West Sussex ;: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 18–21.
    The triumphal advance of the beings from logical space seems less formidable from the inside. This chapter deals with those enthusiasts who are even now preparing to bring on the impossible world. Trial‐and‐error modal logic is not the only way to take modality as primitive. There is also the option of reducing possible worlds to maximal consistent “books” of propositions. The books may be enough like possible worlds so that at least some of the explanatory power of (...) worlds semantics carries over. There are unproblematic mathematical entities that can be regarded as representing distributions of matter in space‐time, and thereby as representing the possible worlds where matter is so distributed. An account is to be found in Quince's "Propositional Objects." According to classical mathematics, these representatives do form a set. But propositions are sometimes conceived differently, as language independent entities that nevertheless have something analogous to syntactic structure. (shrink)
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