Special Seminar on Selected Philosophical Issues

**Schedule: March 2, 9, 16, 23, 2012.

This is a ONE unit course consists of four triple lessons.

subtitle: David Lewis’s theory of possibility

course outline:

This 4-week course will be on the metaphysics of possibility and necessity. The central reading will be David Lewis’s book On the Plurality of Worlds, which offers a hyper-realist view of these topics; but we will also consider a gradation of less and less realist views (e.g. the views of Robert Stalnaker and Simon Blackburn). Some of the discussions in Lewis and in the other readings also raise interesting issues that go beyond the metaphysics of possibility and necessity, and we will pursue some of these issues.

My tentative plan is to primarily discuss Lewis’s book, one chapter per week, though to look at some other reading to supplement it. The students should read the week’s chapter, and the other associated reading, carefully in advance; I will spend about half the class presenting selected topics from the reading, with the other half devoted to discussion of issues that the students raise.

The first chapter is the longest and hardest, and I will defer discussion of parts of it until later weeks. But you should at least do an initial reading before the first class. I’d also like you to read Blackburn’s “Morals and Modals” before the first class; it gives an extremely different view of the metaphysics of possibility and necessity, and I will spend some time talking about it.

General Reading list:

[If you’ve never read Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, you might consider reading that ahead of time, since parts of Lewis’s book is a reaction to it.]

The Blackburn papers are in his Essays in Quasi-Realism (cited as EQR). The Stalnaker papers are in his Ways a World Might Be (cited as WWMB).

I’ll make the Schechter and Skow papers, and my own papers, available on the internet.
　

Week 1: Lewis Ch 1; Blackburn “Morals and Modals” (Ch 3 of EQR, PDF)

Week 2: Lewis Ch 2; Stalnaker “On What Possible Worlds Could not Be” (Ch 2 of WWMB, PDF); Schechter, “The Reliability Challenge and the Epistemology of Logic” (PDF)

Week 3: Lewis Ch 3; Stalnaker “Possible Worlds” (Ch 1. of WWMB, PDF).

Week 4: Lewis Ch 4; Section 6 of Introduction to Field, Realism, Mathematics and Modality (PDF); Skow, “Haecceitism, Anti-Haecceitism and Possible Worlds” (PDF)

Also of interest: Stalnaker, “Impossibilities” (Ch 3 of WWMB, PDF); Blackburn, “Opinions and Chances” (Ch 4 of EQR, PDF).

Some reading of my own, related to this material:

W1-3: “Stalnaker on Intentionality” (PDF)

W2: Section 4B of Introduction to Field, Realism, Mathematics and Modality. (PDF)

[Also, W1-4: Sections 2-4 of “What Is Logical Validity?”. The material relevant to the course is Sections 3-4, but you’d probably need to get the main idea of Section 2, though you could definitely skip the technical details. This paper is primarily relevant to the Blackburn, so perhaps is only marginally relevant to the course.]