Wondering about the Impossible: On the Semantics of Counterpossibles PDF Download
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Author: Maciej Sendłak
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031653610
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Author: Maciej Sendłak
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031653610
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Francesco Berto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198812795
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
The latter half of the 20 ...
Author: Maciej Sendłak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783031653605
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the nature and role of hypothetical reasoning about impossibilities. The interest in this subject stems from the simple observation that wondering is an inherent aspect of our experience. Whether one regrets choosing a taxicab over the subway or contemplates the outcome of an election turning out differently, the question 'What would have happened if...?' is a familiar one. While we often focus on possible scenarios, we also ponder impossible ones: What if whales were fish? What if a man could be in two places at once? What if one could draw a round square? Puzzles concerning such questions sparked a heated discussion over the nature and role of hypothetical reasoning about impossibilities. This book goes beyond being an opinionated introduction to this debate. After comparing various approaches to this issue, it proposes a novel perspective that draws on considerations from epistemology and the philosophy of explanation and dependence. Targeting researchers and students interested in the philosophy of modalities, this book delivers an in-depth analysis of a captivating and often overlooked aspect of human reasoning.
Author: Rafał Urbaniak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331958507X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
This book features mathematical and formal philosophers’ efforts to understand philosophical questions using mathematical techniques. It offers a collection of works from leading researchers in the area, who discuss some of the most fascinating ways formal methods are now being applied. It covers topics such as: the uses of probable and statistical reasoning, rational choice theory, reasoning in the environmental sciences, reasoning about laws and changes of rules, and reasoning about collective decision procedures as well as about action. Utilizing mathematical techniques has been very fruitful in the traditional domains of formal philosophy – logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics – while formal philosophy is simultaneously branching out into other areas in philosophy and the social sciences. These areas particularly include ethics, political science, and the methodology of the natural and social sciences. Reasoning about legal rules, collective decision-making procedures, and rational choices are of interest to all those engaged in legal theory, political science and economics. Statistical reasoning is also of interest to political scientists and economists.
Author: Boris Kment
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191668990
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concerns the questions of what is possible and what is necessary. However, there is considerable controversy over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This procedure is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, the relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships. In the course of developing this position, the book offers new accounts of possible worlds, counterfactual conditionals, essential truths and their role in grounding, and a novel theory of how counterfactuals relate to causation and explanation.
Author: Brian Leftow
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191654876
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 588
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Book Description
Brian Leftow offers a theory of the possible and the necessary in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some 'possible world' (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. God and Necessity holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. It assigns the metaphysical 'work' such items usually do to God and events in God's mind, and reduces 'broadly logical' modalities to causal modalities, replacing possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. Leftow argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God's existence. Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God's nature. Leftow disagrees: he argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures are due ultimately to God's unconstrained imagination and choice. On his theory, it is in no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that is a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how God thought of them. Thus Leftow's essay in metaphysics takes a half-step toward Descartes' view of modal truth, and presents a compelling theist theory of necessity and possibility.
Author: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300163037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.
Author: Klaas J. Kraay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108656765
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Theism is the view that God exists; naturalism is the view that there are no supernatural beings, processes, mechanisms, or forces. This Element explores whether things are better, worse, or neither on theism relative to naturalism. It introduces readers to the central philosophical issues that bear on this question, and it distinguishes a wide range of ways it can be answered. It critically examines four views, three of which hold (in various ways) that things are better on theism than on naturalism, and one of which holds just the opposite.
Author: Frank Jackson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199274567
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
David Lewis's untimely death on 14 October 2001 deprived the philosophical community of one of the outstanding philosophers of the 20th century. As many obituaries remarked, Lewis has an undeniable place in the history of analytical philosophy. His work defines much of the current agenda in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind and language. This volume, an expanded edition of a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, covers many of the topics for which Lewis was well known, including possible worlds, counterpart theory, vagueness, knowledge, probability, essence, fiction, laws, conditionals, desire and belief, and truth. Many of the papers are by very established philosophers; others are by younger scholars including many he taught. The volume also includes Lewis's Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, "How Many Lives has Schrödinger's Cat?," published here for the first time. Lewisian Themes will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying Lewis's work and a major contribution to the many topics that he mastered.
Author: Andreas Müller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191070963
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Some things are reasons for us to perform certain actions. That it will spare you great pain in the future, for example, is a reason for you to go to the dentist now, and that you are already late for work is a reason for you not to read the next article in the morning paper. Why are such considerations reasons for or against certain actions? Constructivism offers an intriguing answer to this question. Its basic idea is often encapsulated in the slogan that reasons are not discovered but made by us. Andreas Müller elaborates this idea into a fully-fledged account of practical reasons, makes its theoretical commitments explicit, and defends it against some well-known objections. Constructing Practical Reasons begins with an examination of the distinctive role that reason judgements play in the process of practical reasoning. This provides the resources for an anti-representationalist conception of the nature of those judgements, according to which they are true, if they are true, not because they accurately represent certain normative facts, but because of their role in sound reasoning. On the resulting view, a consideration owes its status as a reason to the truth of the corresponding reason judgement and thus, ultimately, to the soundness of a certain episode of reasoning. Consequently, our practical reasons exhibit a kind of mind-dependence, but this does not force us to deny their objectivity.
