This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

But Findlay's remark, like so much that has been written on the subject of time in the present century, was provoked in the first place by McTaggart's ...

Determinism is a perennial topic of philosophical discussion. Very little acquaintance with the philosophical literature is needed to reveal the Tower of ...

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...) argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the "reviewed view" of scientific explanation to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts. (shrink)

Process and Reality, Whitehead’s magnum opus, is one of the major philosophical works of the modern world, and an extensive body of secondary literature has developed around it. Yet surely no significant philosophical book has appeared in the last two centuries in nearly so deplorable a condition as has this one, with its many hundreds of errors and with over three hundred discrepancies between the American and the English editions, which appeared in different formats with divergent paginations. The work itself (...) is highly technical and far from easy to understand, and in many passages the errors in those editions were such as to compound the difficulties. The need for a corrected edition has been keenly felt for many decades. (shrink)

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

Stit, a sentence form first introduced in Belnap and Perloff (1988), encourages a modal approach to agency. Von Wright, Chisholm, Kenny, and Castañeda have all attempted modal treatments of agency, while Davidson has rejected such treatments. After a brief explanation of the syntax and semantics of stit and a restatement of several of the important claims of the earlier paper, I discuss the virtues of stit against the background of proposals made by these philososphers.

A structure is described that can serve as a foundation for a semantics for a modal agentive construction such as sees to it that Q ([ stit: Q]). The primitives are Tree,,Instant, Agent, choice. Eleven simple postulates governing this structure are set forth and motivated. Tree and encode a picture of branching time consisting of moments gathered into maximal chains called histories. Instant imposes a time-like ordering. Agent consists of agents, and choice assigns to each agent and each moment in (...) Tree a set of possible choices, where each possible choice is a set of histories. All of these ingredients are referred to in the semantics suggested for [ stit: Q]. The most complex part of the discussion is the motivation for the definition of what it means for a typically non-terminating chain of moments jointly to witness the truth of [ stit: Q] at a moment.The paper begins with an informal account of the Refref conjecture, which says that the only way to refrain from refraining from seeing to something is to see to it. The paper ends with a consideration of an argument of Prior's that in a certain sense contemplation and action are inconsistent. (shrink)

Minkowski geometry is axiomatized in terms of the asymmetric binary relation of optical connectibility, using ten first-order axioms and the second-order continuity axiom. An axiom system in terms of the symmetric binary optical connection relation is also presented. The present development is much simpler than the corresponding work of Robb, upon which it is modeled.

A theory of temporal passage is put forward which is "objective" in the sense that time flow characterizes the universe independently of the existence of conscious beings. The theory differs from Grunbaum's "mind-dependence" theory, and is designed to avoid Grunbaum's criticisms of an earlier theory of Reichenbach's. The representation of temporal becoming is accomplished by the introduction of indeterministic universe-models; each model representing the universe at a time. The models depict the past as a single four-dimensional manifold, and the future (...) as a branched structure of such manifolds. Time flow is relativistic in that it manifests itself in a frame-dependent (but not observer-dependent) way. The indeterministic character of the universe-models is mirrored in a "temporal" theory of truth which rejects the principle of bivalence, and suitable semantics are provided for this theory. Finally, an account of physical law is given which defines it in terms of physical possibility, rather than vice versa. (shrink)

The conditional,if an agent did something, then the agent could have done otherwise, is analyzed usingstit theory, which is a logic of seeing to it that based on agents making choices in the context of branching time. The truth of the conditional is found to be a subtle matter that depends on how it is interpreted (e.g., on what otherwise refers to, and on the difference between could and might) and also on whether or not there are busy choosers that (...) can make infinitely many choices in a finite span of time. (shrink)

As cause we often specify an event the occurrence of which first guaranteed that of the effect. This notion is explicated in a framework of branching worlds in Sections I to V. VI and VII point out its close relations to the concept of an agent's bringing about an event. The topic of the last two sections is the distinction between causes and necessary circumstances. For this purpose conditionals are used, interpreted with respect to branching worlds without a similarity relation (...) between them. (shrink)

It has been repeatedly argued, most recently by Nicholas Maxwell, that the special theory of relativity is incompatible with the view that the future is in some degree undetermined; and Maxwell contends that this is a reason to reject that theory. In the present paper, an analysis is offered of the notion of indeterminateness (or "becoming") that is uniquely appropriate to the special theory of relativity, in the light of a set of natural conditions upon such a notion; and reasons (...) are given for regarding this conception as (not just formally consistent with relativity theory, but also) philosophically reasonable. The bearings upon Maxwell's program for quantum theory are briefly considered. (shrink)