From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis

Philosophy and scientific realism

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century Born in Germany and later a US citizen, he was a founder of the philosophical movement known as Logical Empiricism He was strongly influenced by a number of different philosophical traditions (including the legacies of both Kant and Husserl), and also by the German Youth Movement, the First World War (in which he was wounded and decorated), and radical socialism This book places his central ideas in a broad cultural, political and intellectual context, showing how he synthesised many different currents of thought to achieve a philosophical perspective that remains strikingly relevant in the twenty-first century Its rich account of a philosopher's response to his times will appeal to all who are interested in the development of philosophy in the twentieth century

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Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment

Dynamics of Reason

1. Introduction 2. Absolute motion and the emergence of classical mechanics 3. Empiricism and apriorism from Kant to Poincare 4. The origins of significance of relativity theory 5. Conclusion.

Understanding space-time : the philosophical development of physics from Newton to Einstein

Let’s fix some terminology at the start. A world (or possible world – for me, the ‘possible’ is redundant) is, first, an individual, not a set or class; second, a particular, not a property or universal; third, concrete in this sense: it is fully determinate in all qualitative respects; and, fourth, a maximal interrelated whole: each world is internally unified, and isolated from every other world. There is at least one world, the world we are part of. It is an actual world, the actual world if there are no “island universes.” Worlds that are not actual (if any) are merely possible. A realist about possible worlds believes that there is a plenitudinous plurality of worlds: whenever something is possible – for example, that donkeys talk, or that pigs fly – there is a world in which it is true. There is more than one way to be a realist about possible worlds. Realists divide into two camps depending upon their account of actuality. According to David Lewis,

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Absolute actuality and the plurality of worlds

https://philpapers.org/archive/BRICPW.pdf

Concrete possible worlds

These original essays explore the philosophical implications of Newton's work. They address a wide range of topics including Newton's influence on his contemporaries and successors such as Locke and Kant, and his views on the methodology of science, on absolute space and time, and on the Deity. Howard Stein compares Newton's refusal to lock natural philosophy into a preexisting system with the more rigid philosophical predilections of his near-contemporaries Christian Huygens and John Locke. Richard Arthur's commentary provides a useful gloss on Stein's essay. Lawrence Sklar puzzles over Newton's attempts to provide a unified treatment of the various "real quantities": absolute space, time, and motion. According to Phillip Bricker's responding essay, however, the distinctions Sklar draws do not go to the heart of the debate between realists and representationalists. J. E. McGuire and John Carriero debate Newtons views of the relationship between the Deity and the nature of time and space. Peter Achinstein looks at the tension between Newton's methodological views and his advocacy of a corpuscular theory of light; he suggests that Newton could justify the latter by a "weak" inductive inference, but R.I.G. Hughes believes that this inference involves an induction Newton would be unwilling to make. Immanuel Kant's critique of Newton's view of gravity is discussed and amplified by Michael Friedman In response, Robert DiSalle raises a number of problems for Friedman's analysis. Errol Harris and Philip Grier extend the discussion to the present day and look at the ethical implications of Newton's work. Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science is included in the Johns Hopkins Series on the History and Philosophy of Science.

Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science

tart with ordinary Euclidean space. Be a realist about points, and about S distances between points. I ask: how are the points interwoven to form the fabric of space? Are there direct ties only between “neighboring points,” so that points at a distance are connected only indirectly through series of such direct ties? Or are there also direct ties between distant points, so that the fabric is reinforced, as it were, by irreducibly global spatial relations? To fix ideas, roughly, try the following thought experiment. Take a scissors and cut along some plane in space, severing the points just to one side of the plane from the points just to the other. Does space thereby fall into two disconnected pieces, so that points on one side now stand at no spatial distance from points on the other? Or does space, being reinforced, retain its shape? If space is maximally reinforced by direct ties of distance, then a distance relation, such as being rwentyfeetfrorn, is intrinsic to the points that stand in it. Whether or not the relation holds depends solely upon the intrinsic nature of the two points, and of the composite of the points. On the other hand, if space is not maximally reinforced by direct ties of distance, then a distance relation will not in general be intrinsic to the points that stand in it, and its holding may depend in part upon features of the surrounding space. What features? To fix ideas, roughly, try the following thought experiment. Start with two points, say, twenty feet apart, and remove some of the space directly between the two points. (I do not mean just the matter or energy occupying the space; I mean the space itself.) I ask: now how far apart are the points? Are they still twenty feet apart, on the grounds that distance, being intrinsic, is indifferent to changes in the intervening space? Or are they now less than twenty feet apart, on the grounds that there is now less space between them? Or are they now more than twenty feet apart, on the grounds that the shortest (continuous) path from one to the other is now more than twenty feet long? We have three competing answers, each, I think, with some intuitive appeal. Which is correct? And how can we tell?

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The Fabric of Space: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Distance Relations

Examinant le realisme mereologique des mondes possibles developpe par D. Lewis, l'A. introduit les notions d'isolation et unifcation dans le problemes des mondes logiquement unifies. Rejetant la conception spatio-temporelle de Lewis, l'A. montre que la question de la demarcation des mondes est liee a celle des univers insulaires

Phillip Bricker

Papers

Absolute actuality and the plurality of worlds

Concrete possible worlds

Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science

The Fabric of Space: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Distance Relations

Isolation and unification: The realist analysis of possible worlds