Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Modal Matters

  • A Closer Look at Material Composition and Modal Discernibility Arguments

    (For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.) Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of TinkerToy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort.  A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically'…

  • Necessitas Consequentiae versus Necessitas Consequentiis

    Take the sentence, 'If I will die tomorrow, then I will die tomorrow.' This has the form If p, then p, where 'p' is a placeholder for a proposition. Any sentence of this form is not just true, but logically true, i.e., true in virtue of its logical form. Now every sentence true in virtue of its…

  • From the Mailbag: Faith and Modality

    An astute reader e-mails,  First, sometime ago I recommended John Bishop's Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and  Ethics of Religious Belief . If you have yet to read the book, I would recommend his new article on Faith in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You may be particularly interested in sections 7-10.   Second, I…

  • A Cantorian Argument Why Possible Worlds Cannot be Maximally Consistent Sets of Propositions

    A commenter in the 'Nothing' thread spoke of possible worlds as sets.  What follows is a reposting from 1 March 2009 which opposes that notion. ……………. In a recent comment, Peter Lupu bids us construe possible worlds as maximally consistent sets of propositions.  If this is right, then the actual world, which is of course one…

  • Could There Have Been Just Nothing At All?

    No doubt, things exist. At least I exist, and that suffices to show that something exists. But could it have been the case that nothing ever existed? Actually, there is something; but is it possible that there have been nothing? Or is it rather the case that necessarily there is something? Is it not only…

  • Modality and Existence

    Steven Nemes, who may prove to be my nemesis, e-mails: I'm enjoying your book so far. I'm starting the constructive half of it now, and am going to reread the chapter "The Ground of the Contingent Existent" after a quick skim over it recently. I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but upon hearing…

  • Broadly Logical Modality

    David Brightly has difficulty with the notion of broadly logical modality.  Let me see if I can clarify this notion sufficiently to satisfy him.  It might be best to begin with the notion of narrowly logical impossibility.  I'll number my paragraphs so that David can tell me exactly where he disagrees or finds obscurity. 1. …

  • God: Necessary or Noncontingent?

    Many theists in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas define God as a necessary being.  But if God is a necessary being, then he cannot not exist: he exists in all broadly-logically possible worlds.  The actual world is of course one of these worlds.  So it would seem to follow from the very definition of…

  • A Modal Aporetic Tetrad

    Here is a four-limbed aporetic polyad: 1. The merely possible is not actual. 2. To be actual is to exist. 3. To exist is to be. 4. The merely possible is not nothing. Each limb is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  The first three limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed,…

  • The Modal Asymmetry of Birth and Death

    Our births were contingent, our deaths will be necessary. (The literary value of this aphorism, if you care to assign it any, trades on an equivocation, which I leave to the reader to detect.)

  • Contingent, Necessary, Impossible: A Note on Nicolai Hartmann

    Nicolai Hartmann, Moeglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, p. 29:  . . . denn das Zufaellige ist immerhim wirklich, und nur die Notwendigkeit negiert.  Hartmann is saying in effect that everything contingent is actual, and that the contingent and the necessary are polar opposites:  what is contingent is not necessary, and what is not necessary is contingent. I beg…

  • Another Example of a Necessary Being Depending for its Existence on a Necessary Being

    The Father and the Son are both necessary beings.  And yet the Father 'begets' the Son.  Part, though not the whole, of the notion of begetting here must be this: if x begets y, then y depends for its existence on x.  If that were not part of the meaning of 'begets'' in this context, I…

  • Can A Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

    According to the Athansian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the…

  • Does Inconceivability Entail Impossibility?

    In an earlier thread James Anderson makes some observations that cast doubt on the standard entailment from inconceivability to impossibility.  (I had objected that his  theological mysterianism seems to break the inferential link connecting inconceivability and impossibility.) He writes, But even though we have no direct epistemic access to any other inconceivability than our own,…

  • Alvin Plantinga on YouTube: A Modal Argument for Dualism

    Here.  The host, Robert Kuhn, "an old brain scientist" as he describes himself, can't seem to wrap his mind around the argument.  The argument goes like this, where 'B' denotes (rigidly designates) a person's body or else that part of a person's body (presumably the brain or a part of the brain) with which the…