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.

Possible worlds present a formidable challenge for the lover of desert landscapes. One cannot ignore their usefulness; they provide, as David Lewis puts it, “a philosophers’ paradise”.1 But to enter paradise possibilia must be fit into a believable ontology. Some follow Lewis and accept worlds at face value, but most prefer some other choice from the current menu. Part of Chihara’s book is a critical discussion of some of these menu options: Lewis’s modal realism, Alvin Plantinga’s abstract modal realism, Graeme (...) Forbes’s anti-realism and Gideon Rosen’s modal fictionalism. These discussions are very detailed and conversant with the literature. The discussions of Forbes and of paradox within Plantinga’s system are particularly enlightening. The rest of the book is devoted to Chihara’s positive project: developing an account of the status of model theory for non-modal logic, and then applying it to the modal case. The prize is an understanding of possible worlds semantics that requires no commitment to possible worlds at all What does the relativized notion of truth in an interpretation studied in model theory have to do with plain old truth? Chihara’s answer involves “connecting theorems” that relate truth-in to truth. A “natural-language proto-interpretation of the sentential calculus” is a function that assigns meanings of declarative sentences of English to sentence letters. Where I is an NLPI of SC and φ is a sentence letter, Chihara uses ‘[φ/I ]’ to refer to “φ with the meaning it has been assigned by I ” ; where φ is not atomic, he says. (shrink)

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

This book, one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus, and others are contributing, is an exploration and defense of the notion of modality de re, the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. Plantinga develops his argument by means of the notion of possible worlds and ranges over such key problems as the nature of essence, transworld identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence (...) of unactual objects in other possible worlds. He also applies his logical theories to the elucidation of two problems in the philosophy of religion: the problem of evil and the ontological argument. (shrink)

Of course we all know now that mathematics has proved that logic doesn't really make sense, but Etchemendy (philosophy, Stanford Univ.) goes further and challenges the received view of the conceptual underpinnings of modern logic by arguing that Tarski's model-theoretic analysis of logical consequences is wrong. He may have found the soft underbelly of the dead horse. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Hilary Putnam, who may have been the first philosopher to advance the notion that the computer is an apt model for the mind, takes a radically new view of his...