Sellars’s definition of the aim of philosophy, ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’, corresponds to my aspirations for the subject. In this article I lay out a very different view of what realism should be, in the hope that it may contribute to that inspiring aim. The difference between our two versions of realism lies in the opposition between Sellars’s picture of two ‘images’, the (...) ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’, with the scientific image being the ‘measure’ of what is, and the picture I offer, in which there are not sharply delineated ‘scientific images’ and ‘manifest images’, but forms of human discourse that interpenetrate and depend on one another. (shrink)

David Lewis famously takes mereology ‘to be perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain". In this chapter, the author proceeds by articulating four theses that Lewis holds about composition. Three of them are familiar; Lewis himself explicitly articulates and relies upon them. The fourth remains implicit, but it is nonetheless important. The four theses include: composition is unique (the same things cannot have two different fusions); composition is unrestricted (any two things whatsoever have a fusion); composition is ontologically innocent (composed entities do (...) not "count" beyond their parts); and composition is unmysterious (it is not problematic to treat it as primitive, and can function in demystifying explanations). The author devotes a section to each thesis: explaining what it says, pointing to the texts that illustrate that Lewis believes it, and explaining why Lewis believes it. Lewis uses the label ‘uniqueness’ and explicitly endorses the thesis. (shrink)

When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else. I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that possible worlds are more things (...) of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them. (shrink)