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24The Concept of Time (review)Philosophical Review 106 (4): 629-632. 1997.Part 2 is concerned, in chapter 4, with semantic features of dates and duration terms, and, in chapter 5, with the conventionality of measurements of duration, and the incoherence of durationless instants.
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784Composition as a Kind of IdentityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (3): 264-294. 2016.Composition as identity, as I understand it, is a theory of the composite structure of reality. The theory’s underlying logic is irreducibly plural; its fundamental primitive is a generalized identity relation that takes either plural or singular arguments. Strong versions of the theory that incorporate a generalized version of the indiscernibility of identicals are incompatible with the framework of plural logic, and should be rejected. Weak versions of the theory that are based on the idea tha…Read more
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3987Concrete possible worldsIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary debates in metaphysics, Blackwell. pp. 111--134. 2008.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 i…Read more
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151Worlds and Propositions: The Structure and Ontology of Logical SpaceDissertation, Princeton University. 1983.In sections 1 through 5, I develop in detail what I call the standard theory of worlds and propositions, and I discuss a number of purported objections. The theory consists of five theses. The first two theses, presented in section 1, assert that the propositions form a Boolean algebra with respect to implication, and that the algebra is complete, respectively. In section 2, I introduce the notion of logical space: it is a field of sets that represents the propositional structure and whose space…Read more
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23Review of Modality, Morality, and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 62 (1): 328-330. 1997.
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197Isolation and Unification: The Realist Analysis of Possible WorldsPhilosophical Studies 84 (2-3). 1996.If realism about possible worlds is to succeed in eliminating primitive modality, it must provide an 'analysis' of possible world: nonmodal criteria for demarcating one world from another. This David Lewis has done. Lewis holds, roughly, that worlds are maximal unified regions of logical space. So far, so good. But what Lewis means by 'unification' is too narrow, I think, in two different ways. First, for Lewis, all worlds are (almost) 'globally' unified: at any world, (almost) every part is dir…Read more
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |