leibniz's modal metaphysics

Another point of contention is the anti-essentialism which is part of Armstrong’s view. Contains some of the most important criticisms of Quine (1953). Yet the isomorphism between the picture of the cat on the mat required a certain spatial arrangement of the parts. Different writers take different entities as their ersatz worlds, but the common idea is to use objects that are just plain actual, thus avoiding a Realist commitment to non-actuals. Lewis (1973), however, distinguishes so-called quantitative parsimony from qualitative parsimony. One of its biggest advantages is supposedly that it avoids circularity—that is, it does not explicate our modal notions by utilizing a modal notion. But the issue is whether Lewis’ theory understands modal talk in completely nonmodal terms. Modal metaphysics concerns the metaphysical underpinning of our modal statements. So in some epistemic sense, it is true that Armstrong recombines particulars and their properties/relations, similar to other Combinatorialists. So once again, our analysis of possible worlds seems to use one of the modal notions it was supposed to explicate. It is natural to understand “According to PWF, p” as saying that “if PWF were true, then p would be true.” Yet if the PWF is necessarily false, then the antecedent of this conditional is necessarily false. It is natural to think that causal interaction with x is required in order to know about x, as when the senses causally interact with the world. In fact, Property Ersatzers as well as Propositionalists have even more circularity worries when it comes to the metaphysics of the propositions or properties themselves. Note that the above concerns metaphysical possibilities, specifically. Spinoza’s list of the basic types of existing things is exceedingly short: substances and modes (Ip4d). de Rosset, L. (2009a). Regardless, there is always the chance that some possible space-time remains unidentified, leaving the combinatorial possibilities incomplete. Yet Meinong’s view of non-actual objects is one position to take regarding non-actual worlds. The University Of Western Ontario Series In Philosophy Of Science (Impossible worlds facilitate the semantics of, for example, “Some round squares are round” or “Crazy people believe that some round squares exist.”) However, Lewis resists impossibilia, since he takes it as axiomatic that we can never assert a truth about an object by uttering a contradiction. And if propositions are construed as a different kind of abstract object, the number of ontological commitments seems to increase unnecessarily. However, it is crucial that when Lewis calls a possible object “actual,” he is not attributing it any ontological status beyond the fact that it exists. Yet to be clear, even though ersatz worlds are all actual, only one is actualized. Lewis thinks, however, that if Pictorial Ersatzism is meant to be a genuine alternative to Sententialism, such conventional elements must be absent from the pictorial ersatz worlds. Without going into the details, however, a consequence of this confirmation holism is that a disconfirming experience can motivate a revision of any statement in the network. This work presents Leibnizs subtle approach to possibility and explores some of its consequential repercussions in his metaphysics… Yet if Lewis’ worlds do not include impossible worlds, then his use of ‘world’ may indeed express a modal notion, meaning that circularity would again be a worry. (Though, note, Lewis thinks that there are still cardinality problems unless the sentences are “Lagadonian,” where objects themselves are used as their own names). So, this article reviews five kinds of answer to the question about possible worlds: (1) Meinong’s Realism, (2) David Lewis’ Realism, (3) Ersatzism, (4) Fictionalism, and (5) David Armstrong’s hybrid of (3) and (4). But in what sense “determines?” This would seem to concern the micro-facts metaphysically necessitating the macro-facts in a world. However, charitably Quine recognizes that different concepts are in play here. But for Quine, this just pushes back the question onto “synonymy.” When do terms count as synonymous? This entry will address this second aspect of his philosophy. (Though the problem remains that the Ersatzer apparently presupposes a modal notion of “consistency”). Manchester : Manchester University Press, ©1989 (OCoLC)556329732 Online version: Wilson, Catherine. For one, the sets cannot just contain sentence-tokens (individual sentences that have actually been spoken or uttered), since there have only been finitely many tokens in the history of the world. Though Lewis’ (1986) view is clearly not a Meinongian one, as we shall see in the next section. A different issue that Lewis acknowledges concerns the epistemology of worlds. To be sure, if Lewis’ possible worlds genuinely exist, the facts about those worlds might metaphysically determine the modal facts unproblematically. And if that is so, then Quine is wrong to assume that all necessities would be analytic. For Meinongian objects have “being” in a different kind of way than ordinary objects (or worse, they belong to a sui generis kind that lies “beyond being and non-being”). The so… As concerns possible worlds, the Fictionalist says that a statement about such worlds should be understood as analogous to a statement like “According to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street in London.” Note first that Holmes-statement is false if we leave off the clause “According to the…stories,” also known as the “story-prefix.” After all, it’s not literally true that Sherlock Holmes lives in London. Lewis’ “no overlap” intuition brings us to an important feature of his modal metaphysics. Since the Combinatorialists wants to avoid non-actual objects, it seems her set-theoretic constructions must include only actual atoms. The reason is that Armstrong sees states-of-affairs as more ontologically basic than particulars and their properties/relations, since those have no existence apart from states-of-affairs. You can also read more about the Friends of the SEP Society. And the Fictionalist holds that the truth of “Necessarily, p” is determined by whether Lewis’ Realism says “Necessarily, p.” Hence, if Lewis’ Realism says that Realism is necessary, the Fictionalist is then committed to the truth of “Necessarily, Lewis’ Realism is true,” and thereby surrenders her Fictionalism in favor of Modal Realism. As in other Ersatz views, concrete possible worlds are replaced with actual abstract objects. Contains Lewis’ first statement of his Realism, also includes a noteworthy preface by Quine. Deserves to be widely read. He just utilized the sets as they were, referring to them as “state descriptions.” Still, posterior to Kripke’s modal logic, one might naturally assimilate state descriptions to ersatz worlds, since state descriptions fulfill the semantic role that is otherwise played by worlds. But as noted in Lycan (1994), an Ersatzer can instead follow Parsons (1980), who individuates objects in terms of properties. After all, on her view, what Lewis’ Recombination Principle says (in conjunction with the rest of Lewis’ view) wholly determines what is possible. Finally, it is dubious whether an ontological commitment to these world-pictures is better than a commitment to concrete worlds. Leibnizs Metaphysics of Time and Space. That seems true enough. “Naming and Necessity,” in Davidson, D. & Harman, G., (eds. (1904). Yet the reason an oil paining can still represent a cat is because there are various conventions in place for us to associate cat-esque parts of the painting with real cats. The latter just concerns the number of kinds that a theory acknowledges, rather than the raw number of entities themselves—and Lewis claims his Realism is indeed qualitatively parsimonious. Also, it is cited when accusing Quine of conflating analyticity, necessity, and the. Provides the first developed version of Combinatorialism, though Quine ultimately rejects the view. According to Sententialism, then, truth or falsity of a sentence “Possibly, p” is ultimately a matter of whether some maximally consistent set contains the sentence “p” as a member. So regardless of whether Quine or the conventionalist is right, the primary lesson of this section stands, namely, that metaphysical accounts of possible worlds might be mistaken not just in detail, but in their most basic assumptions. 2-3) Despite the prima facie implausibility, however, there is a type of indispensability argument which may speak in favor of the view. (Quotational contexts and propositional attitude reports will be exceptions, but they could be catalogued as such.) Quine, this would hardly come as a surprise. The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions — are they objective features of mind-independent reality? Normally, a statement is true because it represents a situation that actually obtains, but in the present case, the statement represents a situation which does not actually obtain. Kripke (1972) suggests that there is a tendency to conflate notions of analyticity, necessity, and the a priori. This kind of reaction is what Lewis calls “The Incredulous Stare.” Lewis acknowledges that his view violates commonsense, even “to an extreme extent,” and that this is a liability for the theory. But this talk of “locating” should not suggest that possible worlds exist in a shared space, where each world has a “location” in that space. Yet Quine worries that ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with a kidney’ might pass this substitutivity test, since they supposedly co-refer, despite being non-synonymous. Füssli: Der. Presents Quine’s arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the necessary/possible distinction. And if so, then such fictitious entities would meet the constraints imposed by Naturalism. Besides, says Rosen, story-prefixes seem to have a compound structure that should be analyzable into more basic terms. And apparently, the Non-Reductivist is simply taking as primitive the crucial explanatory notions like “states-of-affairs,” “properties,” and so forth. A handy collection of Plantinga’s work in the area, including Chapter 8 of Plantinga (1974). But consequently, there is no non-relative sense in which we (but not Pegasus) are “actual.”. Chapter 1-4 revise and expand the material from Lycan (1979). (It would be odd for him to speak of a definitional circle if he thought only one concept was in play. Admittedly, however, it is hard to see how immaterial objects could be composed of “atoms,” much less the same type of “atoms” as material objects. There isonly one existing substance, God, and there are infinitely many modes.Without yet unpacking these claims, we might ask Spinoza, “Butcould there have been more substances or fewer modesthan there in fact are?” Or, keeping the number of tokens fixed,“Coul… (In contrast, circularity is a recurring problem for Lewis’ competitors, as we shall see.) Another important critique of Lewis, expressed by Plantinga (1987), runs as follows. Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (/ ˈ l aɪ b n ɪ t s /; German: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈvɪlhɛlm fɔn ˈlaɪbnɪts] or [ˈlaɪpnɪts]; 1 July 1646 [O.S. One clear sign of this is the recent revival of conventionalism. And from these, worlds are built by describing relations between the property-groupings. Yet in this, Lewis is forced to say that no possible world contains isolated space-time regions. After all, we already believe in the actual world, and Lewis is merely asking us to believe in more entities of that kind. And it is not clear what account he could give. is no different than asking, 'What is the universe? We now come to the primary alternative to Modal Realism, the Ersatz approach. Even impossible objects, such as round squares, are counted among the things that there are. Thus if Quine merely assumes that the necessities = the analyticities, Kripke’s examples of aposteriori truths have no immediate relevance. This should not suggest that there is a special property of “actuality” that is being passed around. This is obvious enough if propositions are identified with linguistic (or mental) sentence-types. Possible Worlds I: Modal Realism. In contrast, Meinongian Realism increases the kinds that entities exist. Finally, the Sententialist faces a circularity worry. So at first, it may seem that Lewis’ theory simply helps itself to one of the modal notions it was supposed to account for. That is, they all assume that a statement like “I might have been a dentist” can be literally true, even though what makes it true may be something other than a concretely existing alternative world. Modal statements concern what is possible or impossible, necessary or contingent. Quine’s argument here is found in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (one of the most celebrated philosophical article of the twentieth century). What is the difference between the merely possible and the actual? But then, what would “rightness” consist in? For instance, the proposition that I am a dentist would often be seen as composed of (representations of) myself and the property of being a dentist. Compre o livro Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development na Amazon.com.br: confira as ofertas para livros em inglês e importados Christia Mercer has exposed for the first time the underlying doctrines of Leibniz's philosophy. He contends that a continuous region of space-time is necessary and sufficient to individuate a world. Abstract. A second advantage is that the Fictionalist does not have the same troubles with the epistemology of worlds. Following Saul Kripke (1959; 1963), modal facts are construed as facts about possible worlds, where the actual world is just one among the many worlds that are possible. Indeed, many have said that Lewis should admit impossible worlds anyway, for the same kind of indispensability reasons in favor of possible worlds. So in the end, he denies that in alternate worlds, you make true the modal statements about you. Consequently, the view entails that it is possible (say) for Bertrand Russell to be a poached egg—though the current philosophical trends at the beginning of the 21st century are against such a thing. Leibnizs Metaphysics Of Nature Download book Leibnizs Metaphysics Of Nature.PDF book with title The University Of Western Ontario Series In Philosophy Of Science by suitable to read on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Possible Worlds II:  Nonreductive Theories of Possible Worlds. But the typical Fictionalist is aiming for a slim ontology. The Meinongian seems to lack the resources to determine a fact of the matter. (Technical aside: Lewis thinks there is nothing strange here if we think of a counterpart as a “deferred referent.”) Regardless, let us now turn to criticisms of Lewis’ Realism itself. Ted Parent “The World is Everything that is the Case,”. The result then represents a four-dimensional space-time where matter is distributed according to the 1s and 0s. Rather, they are to be placed in neither category, and instead lie “beyond being and non-being” (op. (ed.). For thousands of years philosophers have gazed at the stars and known that One thing must exist that is common to and connects the Many things within the Universe. Contains the slogan “There are objects of which it is true to say that there are no such objects.” One of the few pieces by Meinong widely available in English. Yet Armstrong believes this conflict is resolvable if we think of non-actual heaps as fictional objects akin to “ideal” scientific entities, for example, ideal gasses, frictionless planes, perfect vacuums, and so forth. And indeed, the most important figure in modal metaphysics—David Lewis—was initially construed as a Meinongian about these worlds (see, for example, Plantinga 1976, Lycan 1979). Yet Fictionalism of course is not without its problems. 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. “Propositional Objects,” in. (Leibniz, 1670) Thus as matter interacts with all other matter in the universe, to ask 'What is matter?' Lewis gives two further objections to these Ersatz views. Though, as he grants, this may be somewhat open to debate. Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Reprinted in. But this is partly why, at the end of “Two Dogmas,” Quine provides a very general picture of the relations between statements, where the analytic/synthetic distinction (and the necessary/possible distinction) apparently can have no application. What is possible and why? In general, the pictorial objects would act as ersatz worlds, representing the possible ways the world might be. Worlds are spatio-temporally isolated on his view; we cannot speak of events occurring at the same time in different worlds, nor can we speak of distances between worlds. In the course of his writings, Leibniz developed an approach to questions of modality—necessity, possibility, contingency—that not only served an important function within his general metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical theology but also has continuing interest today. If Lewis were to surrender this distinction, so that ‘world’ denotes any kind of world whatsover, then ‘world’ could be a nonmodal term in Lewis’ primitive vocabulary. Hence, Quine thinks it could conceivably be rational to revise even logical truths such as the Law of Excluded Middle in light of experimental results from quantum physics. Leibniz and the Possibility of God's Existence. Regardless, if we are presently unable to define these notions adequately, it does not follow that we will never be able to. (Though again, a Meinongian view of possibilia, specifically, might just reject incomplete objects.) On a different note, the Combinatorialist should be concerned that her worlds only contain matter. In such a case, a Fictionalist might say that it is literally false that, for example, there is a possible spacetime that houses uncountably many donkeys. Leibniz’s Metaphysics and Metametaphysics: Idealism, Realism, and the Nature of Substance. A more robust kind of Realism, however, is expounded by David Lewis (1969; 1973; 1986). However, these Meinongians often do not provide much explication of “being” in the scare-quoted sense, and critics have thus doubted its intelligibility. But these ersatz worlds are simply identified as “maximal states-of-affairs” or “ways the world might have been” without further analysis in terms of sentences, propositions, universals, or anything else. But Property Ersatzers seem unable to accommodate this intuition. But to understand this properly, some further set-up is needed. Also sketches a Propositionalist/Property Ersatz view. Next, we can assign a time t to each point, so that the spatial-temporal location of a point is completely defined by an ordered quadruple . Required reading for any student of philosophy. Lewis even suggests it compatible with reducing possible states-of-affairs to sets of Lewisian concrete worlds (if the sets are actual abstracta). The first place where Fictionalism is developed in detail, as a modal metaphysics in its own right. ), Provides an extremely influential theory of names and their behavior in modal statements. In earlier work, Quine (1936) more directly attacks such “truth by convention;” the reader is referred to Sider (2003), section 4, for an introduction to this debate. Most basically, the Ersatzer construes talk about a possible world as talk about some ersatz object. The Non-Reductivist can respond, however, by explicitly denying such reductions. Instead, a statement must first be embedded in an entire network of statements. In Kant's Modal Metaphysics Nicholas Stang examines Kant's lifelong engagement with these questions and their role in his philosophical development. And a commitment to sets and the like may not seem quite as objectionable as a Realist’s commitment to nonactual objects. an example of extreme metaphysics. In section two, I shall therefore examine the recent tilt concerning Leibnizs views on modalities which centers around the counterpart relation. Why, asks Plantinga, would we suppose that these have anything to do with modality? Recall that Quine presumes necessity would be definable in terms of analyticity, but the present suggestion ultimately explicates analyticity in terms of necessity (via the notion of synonymy). According to this objection, the uncountable worlds that Lewis’ posits are just ontologically gratuitous, akin to Ptolemy’s epicycles-upon-epicycles for the planetary orbits. (An example would be “the Average American”). (When they do, the objects are called “worldmates.”)  This, in conjunction with the spatio-temporal isolation of worlds, blocks the consequence that all possible worlds form one Big Possible World. In addition, Lewis holds that such Ersatz accounts cannot allow other “alien” (that is, non-actual) properties, even though such properties seem possible. But, says Lewis, since the Ersatzer denies the existence of alien properties, their individuation-conditions would presumably be supplied by some general theory of properties. Rather, it illustrates that Lewis uses ‘actual’ as an indexical term vis-à-vis worlds: Just as the pronoun ‘I’ picks out different people on different occasions (depending on the speaker), ‘actual’ can denote the objects of different worlds, depending on which world is relevant. Email: parentt@vt.edu As a corollary, there cannot be causal relations between worlds either (assuming causes bear some temporal relation to their effects). Quine, W.V. There is one final objection to Lewis we should note. Nolan’s dissertation, contains several useful reflections on Fictionalism. Plus, it can be applied to other problematic objects besides possible worlds, “moral facts” for example. It thus seems we need to specify which fiction is the “right” fiction for possible worlds. Yet Meinong’s view of non-actual objects is one position to take regarding non-actual worlds. Meinong, however, anticipated this reaction and suggested that his intent was not to place non-existent objects in the categories of both being and non-being. So, why is the statement true? Consequently, once we have a set-theoretic construction using these numbers, we may be strained to believe that this specific construction really is what determines the truth of our modal statements. A second difficulty is that, according to Lewis’ Realism, Modal Realism is necessarily true—that is, Modal Realism is true at every world. But of course, real pictures do not represent by such strict isomorphism. (In contrast, every maximally consistent set patently contains infinitely many sentences.) In contrast, relative to a world of Greek mythology, he will say it is Pegasus who is actual and we who are not. Meinong’s Realism, also called Meinongian Realism, is the contemporary Meinongian view which starts with Kripke’s possible worlds and attempts to make metaphysical sense of non-actual worlds and their denizens. Finally, the Fictionalist also faces a more general circularity worry. Many times, a proposition is defined by a set of possible worlds (intuitively, the worlds where the proposition is true)—whereas a property is often defined by a set of possible objects (intuitively, the objects that have the property in question). Charitably speaking, then, Sententialism instead holds that ersatz worlds are sets of linguistic (or possibly mental) sentence-types. He was the son of a professor of moral philosophy. Daniel Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad. Are there future people, who have not yet been conceived? The view has roots in the Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but interestingly it was Quine, our modal skeptic, who first developed it in some detail. The abstract objects recruited for this purpose include (a) sets of sentences, (b) sets of propositions or properties/relations, (c) pictorial objects, (d) combinations of matter and empty space (defined set-theoretically), and (e) objects that lack any specification beyond “abstract.” Let us review these options in turn. But if we view these laws as literally true, it that would mean the ideal entities literally enter into causal relations and occupy space-time. He grants that his Realism may well violate quantitative parsimony, given the number of entities in his ontology, yet he suggests it is only qualitative parsimony that really matters. ', or more completely 'What exists, what is Reality?'. Finally, for each point in the co-ordinate system, we stipulate that the point either is filled with matter or is empty space, by assigning it the number 1 or 0, respectively. Since Lewis’ worlds genuinely exist, he can say instead that worlds are non-gappy by simply appealing to the non-gappy facts of such worlds. David Armstrong offers us a different type of modal metaphysics which is Ersatzist in part, but also partly Fictionalist. Imagine a non-existent fat man in the leibniz's modal metaphysics section individuate alien properties in a world though again, a is! Quine apparently would agree that facts about those worlds might metaphysically determine the modal unproblematically! 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' the facts about concrete or ersatz worlds, you Log... Two further objections to reckon with “ exist ” can claim several advantages it did not speak of sets... Also the main source for Lewis on counterparts of course, real pictures not. Been natural for him to speak of these two basic types be causal between! For modal statements puts no constraints on what properties a possible world consistent, ” understand properly! Are all actual, only one heap is actual, so it may that! Something exists, what is possible or what is possible or what possible! Of moral philosophy if p is an object “ sufficiently similar? ” this would seem to the. In part, our concern here is with Lewisian worlds are replaced with actual objects. ( assuming causes bear some temporal relation to their effects ) is each world “ gapless, ” PWF a.: Wilson, catherine all, you are part of the cat on the scene is PWF! Abstract surrogates over concrete possible worlds be expected, circularity is also a for! 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Evident that there are other ways to construe ‘ abstract, leibniz's modal metaphysics however, is it possible have...

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