Download or read book Modal Matters written by Phillip Bricker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together his work from four decades, Phillip Bricker provides a comprehensive account of modal reality - the realm of possible worlds - from a Humean perspective, with excursions into neighboring topics in metaphysics. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on aspects of David Lewis's metaphysics and his defence of modal realism, sometimes further developing and defending Lewis's views, sometimes deviating from them in substantial ways. The volume is presented in four parts: part one sketches an account of reality as a whole, both the mathematical and the modal, defending a form of plenitudinous realism; part two presents and defends a realist theory of concrete possible worlds with an absolute ontological distinction between the actual and the merely possible; part three presents and defends a Humean account of modal plenitude, formulating and endorsing principles that guarantee a plenitude of recombination, of possible structures, and of alien contents; and part four applies the Humean account to truthmaking, mereology, spacetime, and quantities. An uncompromising Humean, Bricker shows that holding fast to Humean strictures leads to views that differ in radical ways from those prevalent among contemporary metaphysicians.
Download or read book Modal Justification via Theories written by Bob Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph articulates and defends a theory-based epistemology of modality (TEM). According to TEM, someone justifiably believe an interesting modal claim if and only if (a) she justifiably believes a theory according to which that claim is true, (b) she believes that claim on the basis of that theory, and (c) she has no defeaters for her belief in that claim. The book has two parts. In the first, the author motivates TEM, sets out the view in detail, and defends it against a number of objections. In the second, the author considers whether TEM is worth accepting. To argue that it is, the author sets out criteria for choosing between modal epistemologies, concluding that TEM has a number of important virtues. However, the author also concedes that TEM is cautious: it probably implies that we are not justified in believing some interesting modal claims that we might take ourselves to be justified in believing. This raises a question about TEM's relationship to Peter van Inwagen's modal skepticism, which the author explores in detail. As it turns out, TEM offers a better route to modal skepticism than the one that van Inwagen provides. But rather than being a liability, the author argues that this is a further advantage of the view. Moreover, he argues that other popular modal epistemologies do not fare better: they cannot easily secure more extensive modal justification than TEM. The book concludes by clarifying TEM’s relationship to the other modal epistemologies on offer, contending that TEM need not be a rival to those views, but can instead be a supplement to them.
Download or read book Modal Epistemology After Rationalism written by Bob Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection highlights the new trend away from rationalism and toward empiricism in the epistemology of modality. Accordingly, the book represents a wide range of positions on the empirical sources of modal knowledge. Readers will find an introduction that surveys the field and provides a brief overview of the work, which progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully empiricist accounts of modal knowledge. Early chapters focus on challenges to rationalist theories, essence-based approaches to modal knowledge, and the prospects for naturalizing modal epistemology. The middle chapters present positive accounts that reject rationalism, but which stop short of advocating exclusive appeal to empirical sources of modal knowledge. The final chapters mark a transition toward exclusive reliance on empirical sources of modal knowledge. They explore ways of making similarity-based, analogical, inductive, and abductive arguments for modal claims based on empirical information. Modal epistemology is coming into its own as a field, and this book has the potential to anchor a new research agenda.
Download or read book Modality Matters written by Henrik Lagerlund and published by Uppsala Universitet. This book was released on 2006 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology written by Anand Jayprakash Vaidya and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects original essays on the epistemology of modality and related issues in modal metaphysics and philosophical methodology. The contributors utilize both the newer "metaphysics-first" and the more traditional "epistemology-first" approaches to these issues. The chapters on modal epistemology mostly focus on the problem of how we can gain knowledge of possibilities, which have never been actualized, or necessities which are not provable either by logico-mathematical reasoning or by linguistic competence alone. These issues are closely related to some of the central issues in philosophical methodology, notably: to what extent is the armchair methodology of philosophy a reliable guide for the formation of beliefs about what is possible and necessary. This question also relates to the nature of thought experiments that are extensively used in science and philosophy. Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as well as those whose work is concerned with philosophical methodology more generally.
Download or read book Modal Logic as Metaphysics written by Timothy Williamson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical relations with contingency and change. In Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson argues for positive answers to those questions on the basis of an integrated approach to the issues, applying the technical resources of modal logic to provide structural cores for metaphysical theories. He rejects the search for a metaphysically neutral logic as futile. The book contains detailed historical discussion of how the metaphysical issues emerged in the twentieth century development of quantified modal logic, through the work of such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Arthur Prior, and Saul Kripke. It proposes higher-order modal logic as a new setting in which to resolve such metaphysical questions scientifically, by the construction of systematic logical theories embodying rival answers and their comparison by normal scientific standards. Williamson provides both a rigorous introduction to the technical background needed to understand metaphysical questions in quantified modal logic and an extended argument for controversial, provocative answers to them. He gives original, precise treatments of topics including the relation between logic and metaphysics, the methodology of theory choice in philosophy, the nature of possible worlds and their role in semantics, plural quantification compared to quantification into predicate position, communication across metaphysical disagreement, and problems for truthmaker theory.
Download or read book Modal Matters in Interpretability Logics written by Evan Goris and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modal Logic as Metaphysics written by Timothy Williamson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy Williamson gives an original and provocative treatment of deep metaphysical questions about existence, contingency, and change, using the latest resources of quantified modal logic. Contrary to the widespread assumption that logic and metaphysics are disjoint, he argues that modal logic provides a structural core for metaphysics.
Download or read book Metaphysics Meaning and Modality written by Mircea Dumitru and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book on the provocative and innovative contributions to philosophy of language, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, and logic made by Kit Fine, one of the world's foremost philosophers. Topics covered include meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality.
Download or read book Possibility and Necessity in the Time of Peter Abelard written by Irene Binini and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a major reassessment of Abelard’s modal logic and theory of modalities, and provides a comprehensive study of the 12th-century context in which his views originated and developed, by analysing many logical sources that are still unedited and mostly unexplored.
Download or read book Modal Matters written by Filipe Drapeau Contim and published by . This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ce volume est principalement consacré à l'épistémologie modale, la théorie de la connaissance du possible et du nécessaire entendus au sens métaphysique de la modalité. La question épineuse qui est de savoir comment nous pouvons connaître des traits possibles ou nécessaires du monde est ancienne, mais elle a été renouvelée dans le dernier quart du XXe siècle, par l'essor qu'a connu la métaphysique modale sous l'impulsion des travaux de Saul Kripke et de David Lewis. Différentes réponses sont ici discutées : dérivation de la connaissance modale métaphysique à partir de la pratique ordinaire des contrefactuels, inférence à la meilleure explication, ou bien encore réduction à une forme de connaissance conceptuelle. Les essais se penchent également sur la source de la nécessité, ainsi que sur la sémantique des énoncés modaux épistémiques.
Download or read book The Language of Thought in Late Medieval Philosophy written by Jenny Pelletier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition (externalism, mental causation, resemblance, habits, sensory awareness, the psychology, illusion, representationalism), concepts (universal, transcendental, identity, syncategorematic), logic and language (definitions, syllogisms, modality, supposition, obligationes, etc.), action theory (belief, will, action), and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio’s former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.
Download or read book The Great Endarkenment written by Elijah Millgram and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers have not appreciated how pervasive and deep division of labor is, and consequently they have not noticed the many intellectual devices deployed in managing it. The Great Endarkenment makes the case that those devices are central pieces of puzzles that have traditionally been on philosophers' agendas.
Download or read book Theism and Ultimate Explanation written by Timothy O'Connor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive, yet succinct, analysis of the Philosophy of Religion– from metaphysics through theology. Organized into twosections, the text first examines truths concerning what ispossible and what is necessary. These chapters lay the foundationfor the book’s second part – the search for ametaphysical framework that permits the possibility of an ultimateexplanation that is correct and complete. A cutting-edge scholarly work which engages with thetraditional metaphysician’s quest for a true ultimateexplanation of the most general features of the world weinhabit Develops an original view concerning the epistemology andmetaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible ornecessary Applies this framework to a re-examination of the cosmologicalargument for theism Defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmologicalargument
Download or read book Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Federal Courts Held in Ohio written by United States. Courts and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Modal Future written by Fabrizio Cariani and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the interactions between the semantics, epistemology and metaphysics of the future.
Download or read book Modal Homotopy Type Theory written by David Corfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings." For the past century, philosophers working in the tradition of Bertrand Russell - who promised to revolutionise philosophy by introducing the 'new logic' of Frege and Peano - have employed predicate logic as their formal language of choice. In this book, Dr David Corfield presents a comparable revolution with a newly emerging logic - modal homotopy type theory. Homotopy type theory has recently been developed as a new foundational language for mathematics, with a strong philosophical pedigree. Modal Homotopy Type Theory: The Prospect of a New Logic for Philosophy offers an introduction to this new language and its modal extension, illustrated through innovative applications of the calculus to language, metaphysics, and mathematics. The chapters build up to the full language in stages, right up to the application of modal homotopy type theory to current geometry. From a discussion of the distinction between objects and events, the intrinsic treatment of structure, the conception of modality as a form of general variation to the representation of constructions in modern geometry, we see how varied the applications of this powerful new language can be.
