Free eBooks Modal Logic As Metaphysics Available To Downloads
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 thetechnical 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 andan 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 quantificationcompared to quantification into predicate position, communication across metaphysical disagreement, and problems for truthmaker theory.
File Size: 1953 KB
Print Length: 482 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0198709439
Publisher: OUP Oxford; 1 edition (March 28, 2013)
Publication Date: March 28, 2013
Sold by: Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B00O143O68
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #1,103,624 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #101 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Analytic Philosophy #447 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Logic & Language #952 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Metaphysics
Timothy Williamson's *Knowledge and Its Limits* was *the* book of analytic philosophy in the 2000s. Williamson's cleverly constructed "real analysis" of knowing, which took the concept of knowledge as primitive and rigorously presented standard epistemological problems from that perspective -- often reaching counter-intuitive conclusions about what we don't know we know, or can't know by definition -- set many a young philosopher their tasks in the field. In the 2010s Williamson would like to do it again for metaphysics, using the modal logic developed in the second half of the 20th century to clearly set out a fundamental metaphysical debate between "necessitists" (who claim everything that is necessarily has the structure it has) and "contingentists" (those who view the way our actual world is as a relatively brute fact not underwritten by a larger metaphysical structure) and partially resolve it. It is not to be.*Modal Logic as Metaphysics* discusses many interesting logical systems and their possible metaphysical significance, but the clarity Kripkean model theory initially lent to modal issues in the propositional and first-order cases does not carry over to the baroque systems of Williamson's fancy, which combine so many complicated and poorly-defined features that they are no more useful than a Rorschach blot in determining "what there is". Quantified modal logic appeared *de novo* in the papers of Ruth Barcan Marcus in the 1940s, and one particular formula is associated with her formalization, a "Barcan Formula" that indicates that if it is possible that there is *something* which has a property F, there is something which *possibly* has the property F.
Modal Logic as Metaphysics Modal Testing, Theory, Practice, and Application (Mechanical Engineering Research Studies: Engineering Dynamics Series) Freight Forwarding and Multi Modal Transport Contracts (Maritime and Transport Law Library) Modal and Tonal Counterpoint: From Josquin to Stravinsky Análisis Modal de Fallos y Efectos - AMFE: Ejecución Paso a Paso Integrando Técnicas de Creatividad (Spanish Edition) Apple Pro Training Series: Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8 Logic: Propositional Logic (Quickstudy: Academic) Introduction to Logic: Propositional Logic, Revised Edition (3rd Edition) Critical Thinking: Decision Making with Smarter Intuition and Logic! (Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Logic, Intuition) Set Theory (Studies in Logic: Mathematical Logic and Foundations) Lottery: Law Of Attraction: Secret Lottery Strategies and Systems to Effortlessly Manifest: Abundance! (get rich quick, metaphysics, lottery systems, lotto, manifesting, millionare mind) The Kemetic Tree of Life Ancient Egyptian Metaphysics and Cosmology for Higher Consciousness Iniciacion a la Metafisica/ Introduction to Metaphysics (Spanish Edition) Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics [Aristotelian Commentary Series] Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns (Hackett Classics) Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale Nota Bene S) Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
