Modal Matters: Essays in Metaphysics

✍ Scribed by Phillip Bricker

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 511
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Drawing together his work from four decades, Phillip Bricker provides a comprehensive account of modal reality - the realm of possible worlds - from a Humean perspective, with excursions into neighboring topics in metaphysics. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on aspects of David Lewis's metaphysics and his defence of modal realism, sometimes further developing and defending Lewis's views, sometimes deviating from them in substantial ways. The volume is presented in four parts: part one sketches an account of reality as a whole, both the mathematical and the modal, defending a form of plenitudinous realism; part two presents and defends a realist theory of concrete possible worlds with an absolute ontological distinction between the actual and the merely possible; part three presents and defends a Humean account of modal plenitude, formulating and endorsing principles that guarantee a plenitude of recombination, of possible structures, and of alien contents; and part four applies the Humean account to truthmaking, mereology, spacetime, and quantities. An uncompromising Humean, Bricker shows that holding fast to Humean strictures leads to views that differ in radical ways from those prevalent among contemporary metaphysicians.

✦ Table of Contents

Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Reality
1. Introduction: A Sketch of Reality (2018)
2. Realism without Parochialism (1992)
Postscript to “Realism without Parochialism” (2018)
Part 2. Possible Worlds Realism and Actuality
3. Concrete Possible Worlds (2007)
4. Island Universes and the Analysis of Modality (2001)
5. Absolute Actuality and the Plurality of Worlds (2006)
6. Isolation and Unification: The Realist Analysis of Possible Worlds (1996)
7. Reducing Possible Worlds to Language (1987)
8. Quantified Modal Logic and the Plural De Re (1989)
Part 3. Modal Plenitude
9. Principles of Plenitude (1986)
Postscript to “Principles of Plenitude” (2016)
10. Plenitude of Possible Structures (1991)
Postscript to “Plenitude of Possible Structures” (2016)
11. All Worlds in One: Reassessing the Forrest-Armstrong Argument (2011/2018)
12. On Living Forever (1985)
Part 4. Humean Perspectives on Truthmaking, Mereology, Spacetime, and Quantities
13. Truthmaking: With and without Counterpart Theory (2015)
14. The Relation between General and Particular: Entailment vs. Supervenience (2006)
15. Composition as a Kind of Identity (2016)
16. Composition as Identity, Leibniz’s Law, and Slice-Sensitive Emergent Properties (2019)
17. The Fabric of Space: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Distance Relations (1993)
18. Is There a Humean Account of Quantities? (2017)
Bibliography
Index