Ways a World Might Be
Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 7 August 2003
- ISBN 9780199251490
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages300 pages
- Size 234x157x16 mm
- Weight 455 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
Robert Stalnaker draws together in this volume his seminal work in metaphysics. The central theme is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The book begins with reflections on the general idea of a possible world, and then uses the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify some questions about properties and individuals, reference, thought, and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between questions about what there is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and draws out the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time.
MoreLong description:
Ways a World Might Be collects, and adds to, Robert Stalnaker's published papers on metaphysical issues. The central theme that runs throughout the book is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The essays contain both reflections on the general idea of a space of possibilities and attempts to use the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify semantic and metaphysical questions about properties and individuals, supervenience and essentialism, reference, thought and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between metaphysical and semantic questions - questions about what there is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is.
The book begins by asking what possible worlds are, and how we are able to represent and know about them. Stalnaker argues that we can take possibilities seriously without embracing the kind of modal realism that David Lewis defended, and can take them as fundamental without purporting to offer a reductive account of modality. He then turns to questions about the nature of properties and relations and their role in carving up a space of possibilities, and to questions about the nature of individuals, and the way they are identified across time and possible worlds. The essays in the last two sections of the book are concerned with the interaction of metaphysical and semantic issues, and with the place of subjective experience in our conception of an objective world as it is in itself.
Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and makes explicit some of the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time.
This collection brings together important essays of consistently high quality by a leading contemporary metaphysician. The prospect of a collection offers the author the opportunity to take an overview of his work and to identify its core and unifying themes. And when this opportunity is taken, what is distinctive and demanding of our attention in the authors work emerges more clearly and the work itself emerges with added significance. Robert Stalnaker has taken this opportunity, and so Ways a World Might Be is a collection which stands as a genuinely valuable addition to his previously published work and to the literature of contemporary metaphysics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
I. Ways and Worlds
Possible Worlds
On What Possible Worlds Could Not Be
Impossibilities
II. Carving Up Logical Space
Anti-Essentialism
Varieties of Supervenience
III. Identity In and Across Possible Worlds
Counterparts and Identity
Vague Identity
The Interaction of Modality with Quantifiers and Identity
IV. Semantics, Metasemantics, and Metaphysics
Reference and Necessity
On Considering a Possible World as Actual
Conceptual Truth and Metaphysical Necessity
V. Subjective Possibilities
What is it Like to be a Zombie?
Comparing Qualia Across Persons
On Thomas Nagel's Objective Self
