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922David Lewis: On the Plurality of WorldsIn John Shand (ed.), Central Works of Philosophy, Vol. 5: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After, Acumen Publishing. pp. 246-267. 2006.David Lewis's book 'On the Plurality of Worlds' mounts an extended defense of the thesis of modal realism, that the world we inhabit the entire cosmos of which we are a part is but one of a vast plurality of worlds, or cosmoi, all causally and spatiotemporally isolated from one another. The purpose of this article is to provide an accessible summary of the main positions and arguments in Lewis's book.
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125Quantified Modal Logic and the Plural De ReMidwest Studies in Philosophy 14 (1): 372-394. 1989.Modal sentences of the form "every F might be G" and "some F must be G" have a threefold ambiguity. in addition to the familiar readings "de dicto" and "de re", there is a third reading on which they are examples of the "plural de re": they attribute a modal property to the F's plurally in a way that cannot in general be reduced to an attribution of modal properties to the individual F's. The plural "de re" readings of modal sentences cannot be captured within standard quantified modal logic. I …Read more
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191Reducing possible worlds to languagePhilosophical Studies 52 (3). 1987.The most commonly heard proposals for reducing possible worlds to language succumb to a simple cardinality argument: it can be shown that there are more possible worlds than there are linguistic entities provided by the proposal. In this paper, I show how the standard proposals can be generalized in a natural way so as to make better use of the resources available to them, and thereby circumvent the cardinality argument. Once it is seen just what the limitations are on these more general proposa…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |