Not the least admirable of the late David Lewis’s attributes was his disdain for technical terminology and jargon. His writings are a model demonstrating that, with skill and care, it is possible to discuss even the most mathematical aspects of logic and semantics in clear English prose, and with only a minimum of symbolism. The main text of Parts of Classes [1, hereafter: PoC], a 120-page essay on the foundations of set theory, follows Aristotle in using letters as variables, and (...) has a few dashes and ellipses where it mentions schemata, but is otherwise free of logical notation. The essential advantages of what Church called “the logistic method” do not depend on its typographical accidents!) It is only natural that writers following him have taken one of his expressive words and turned it into a technical term: he allowed ‘atomless gunk’ as a possible complication in the mereological analysis of things, and ‘gunk’ is now a technical term in mereology. Gunk is stuff every part of which contains further parts, stuff which can be divided endlessly without ever arriving at an indivisible atom. (shrink)

The theorems of the simplest and strongest sensible quantified modal logic include the Barcan Formula and its converse. Both formulas face strong intuitive objections. This paper develops a theory of possibilia to meet those objections.

This paper discusses the principle of recombination for possible worlds. It argues that arguments against unrestricted recombination offered by Forrest and Armstrong and by David Lewis fail, but a related argument is a challenge, and recommends that we accept an unrestricted principle of recombination and the conclusion that possible worlds form a proper class.

Mathematical realism is the doctrine that mathematical objects really exist, that mathematical statements are either determinately true or determinately false, and that the accepted mathematical axioms are predominantly true. A realist understanding of set theory has it that when the sentences of the language of set theory are understood in their standard meaning, each sentence has a determinate truth value, so that there is a fact of the matter whether the cardinality of the continuum is א2 or whether there are (...) measurable cardinals, whether or not those facts are knowable by us. (shrink)

Classical mereology is a formal theory of the part-whole relation, essentially involving a notion of mereological fusion, or sum. There are various different definitions of fusion in the literature, and various axiomatizations for classical mereology. Though the equivalence of the definitions of fusion is provable from axiom sets, the definitions are not logically equivalent, and, hence, are not inter-changeable when laying down the axioms. We examine the relations between the main definitions of fusion and correct some technical errors in prominent (...) discussions of the axiomatization of mereology. We show the equivalence of four different ways to axiomatize classical mereology, using three different notions of fusion. We also clarify the connection between classical mereology and complete Boolean algebra by giving two "neutral" axiom sets which can be supplemented by one or the other of two simple axioms to yield the full theories; one of these uses a notion of "strong complement" that helps explicate the connections between the theories. (shrink)