Essays in the Metaphysics of ModalityPerhaps no one has done more in the last 30 years to advance thinking in the metaphysics of modality than has Alvin Plantinga. Collected here are some of his most important essays on this influential subject. Dating back from the late 1960's to the present, they chronicle the development of Plantinga's thoughts about some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics: what is the nature of abstract objects like possible worlds, properties, propositions, and such phenomena? Are there possible but non-actual objects? Can objects that do not exist exemplify properties? Plantinga gives thorough and penetrating answers to all of these questions and many others. This volume contains some of the best work in metaphysics from the past 30 years, and will remain a source of critical contention and keen interest among philosophers of metaphysics and philosophical logic for years to come. |
Contents
| 17 | |
World and Essence | 38 |
Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals? | 64 |
The Nature of Necessity Chapter VIII Possible but Unactual Objects On What There Isnt | 82 |
Actualism and Possible Worlds | 95 |
The Boethian Compromise | 114 |
De Essentia | 131 |
On Existentialism | 150 |
Replies to My Colleagues | 168 |
Two Concepts of Modality Modal Realism and Modal Reductionism | 184 |
Why Propositions Cannot Be Concrete | 221 |
Index | 227 |
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Common terms and phrases
a-transform accidentally actual world actualist affairs Alvin Plantinga anti-Fregean argument Aristotle assertion believe Boethian Buckley Canonical Conception claim coexemplified complement concretist constituents contingent Counterpart Theory course denotes donkeys entails equivalent erty essence of Socrates example existentialism existentialist express a proposition fact failed to exist follows Fregean furthermore haecceity Hamlet hence identical with Socrates impredicative individual essences lacks Leibniz Lewis maximal objects Modal Logic modal realism Nature of Necessity necessarily false necessarily true necessary nonexistent objects null set object distinct obvious osition perhaps person Philosophical Plantinga Plato Pollock possible truth possible world possibly true predicate a property premise prop properties in worlds property essentially proposition expressed proposition Socrates question Quine Raquel Welch realist semantical sentence tokens serious actualism singular propositions snubnosed Socrates exists Socrates is wise someone sort suppose teacher of Plato things thisness tions true propositions W. V. Quine world-indexed property Zwier
Popular passages
Page 27 - An object, of itself and by whatever name or none, must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily and others contingently, despite the fact that the latter traits follow just as analytically from some ways of specifying the object as the former traits do from other ways of specifying it.
Page 26 - ... an individual who counts among his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? Is this concrete individual necessarily rational and contingently twolegged or vice versa? Just insofar as we are talking referentially of the object, with no special bias toward a background grouping of mathematicians as against cyclists or vice versa, there is no semblance of sense in rating some of his attributes as necessary and others as contingent. Some of his attributes count as important and others as unimportant,...
References to this book
Der ontologische Gottesbeweis als kryptognoseologischer Traktat: acht ... Reinhard Hiltscher No preview available - 2006 |