Ways a World Might Be
Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays
Stalnaker, Robert C.,
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Print publication date: 2003
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2005 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925148-3 doi:10.1093/0199251487.001.0001 |
|
|
Abstract:
This book features a collection of papers on metaphysical topics. These papers echo the recurring themes of the Quinean picture, resulting from his critique of logical empiricism. They reflect an ambivalence about metaphysics, a preoccupations with the interplay of semantic and metaphysical questions, and an externalist perspective reflected in Quine’s approach to semantic and metaphysical questions. The book is divided into five parts. Part I focuses on the questions about possible worlds. Parts II and III develop representations of the space of possible worlds that make sense of metaphysical thesis about relations between individuals and their properties. Part IV delves into the relation between semantics and metaphysics. Part V explores the problem of accounting for the subject’s point of view, and its relation to our account of the way the world is and the possible worlds are, in themselves.
Keywords: metaphysics, W.V. Quine, empiricism, semantics, externalism, possible worlds, philosophy Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1.
Possible Worlds (1976/1984)
2.
On what Possible Worlds could not be (1996)
3.
Impossibilities (1996/2002)
4.
Anti-essentialism (1979)
5.
Varieties of Supervenience (1996)
6.
Counterparts and Identity (1987)
7.
Vague Identity (1988)
8.
The Interaction of Modality with Quantification and Identity (1994)
9.
Reference and Necessity (1997)
10.
On considering a Possible World as Actual (2001)
11.
Conceptual Truth and Metaphysical Necessity (2003)
12.
Comparing Qualia across Persons (2000)
13.
What is it like to be a Zombie? (2002)
14.
On Thomas Nagel's Objective Self (2003)
Bibliography
Index
|
|