David Lewis's On the Plurality of Worlds - Sections 1.1 to 1.3
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- Опубликовано: 30 сен 2024
- In this series of videos we will read the 1986 book by David Lewis, "On the Plurality of Worlds". This will allow us an in-depth look into analytic philosophy of modality and the notion of possible worlds, as well Lewis's notorious 'modal realism', which states that all possible worlds exist in the same way that the actual world exists.
Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This video is part of the playlist: • David Lewis - On the P...
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Thanks for this excellent lecture. I got interested in these ideas and therefor the philosopher behind them and it’s great to have your clear explanation of it. To my mind, the infinite possibility offered by possibly worlds is more attractive than being limited to just the actual. I don’t know, perhaps I like the idea that my daydreams could somewhere be actualised, or maybe just that we weren’t imprisoned in an actual world that at times seems so lacking.
But at the same time, it may be enough for such possibilities to just live in the imagination and for us to achieve such a desirable extension to our world this way. I look forward to continuing this series with you in this same actual world and also in infinite others where something similar to this exists!
What a coincidence! I was just reading this book, which I find a very enjoyable experience. Lewis is perhaps my favourite philosopher in terms of quality and clarity of writing. Nice that you’re doing a series on him.
I disagree fundamentally with most of Lewis's positions AND with his entire way of doing philosophy... but he's very good and reading him has been very useful to me.
@@VictorGijsbers I’d be interested to hear why you disagree with his (entire) way of doing philosophy. Although I’m by no means an expert on Lewis’ meta-philosophy, I do really enjoy the way he tries to ‘unsystematise’ philosophy. By going at problems one by one, laying out all the difficulties, and trying to find the philosophical costs to different theories. And as he says in his Papers Volume I: “when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ.”
I think you need not be principled to do good philosophy or even be committed to a certain point of view, but you should just try to expose the underlying questions and costs. This is too often done too implicitly, in my opinion. Which is why I really enjoy Lewis’ explicit way of addressing this.
Let me start by reiterating that I think Lewis was in many ways an excellent philosopher. But I also agree with the following quotation of Adrian Moore, on page 344 of Making Sense of Things: "In Lewis, and in other metaphysicians of his stripe, we find insight, invention, and illumination. But we also find evidence, it seems to me, of the debilitating power of their naturalism, which, by forcing their metaphysics into an inappropriately scientific mould, seriously restricts its impact." Two pages earlier Moore has diagnosed -- I think correctly -- the problem of this naturalism as the problem that these philosophers focus on things and on the sense we make of them, but not on the making of that sense. One example of that is section 1.3 of our book, where Lewis defines belief in terms of events, possible worlds and relations of nearness between possible worlds -- but does not even *ask* whether this picture allows us to make sense of our own sense-making, of our own having of and revising beliefs. But it clearly doesn't. Lewis's analysis of beliefs is purely descriptive, whereas belief is essentially normative -- there is no difference between believing something and believing that one ought to believe something.
If I were to make the point myself instead of having Adrian Moore do it for me, I think I'd start by bemoaning the fact that Lewis (and a whole tradition of philosophers before and after him) does philosophy as if it has no history. In On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis tells us that he won't say anything about Leibniz because he is not a Leibniz specialist and his readings of Leibniz would be amateurish. But what I want from him is not that he does what the Leibniz specialists do, I want him to profit from what the Leibniz specialists have done. It is only by studying the history of philosophy -- and contemporary traditions outside our own -- that allow us to see our own philosophical blind spots. I happen to believe that Lewis has immense blind spots, and that studying philosophy outside of his own 'clique' would have been the way to remove or at least minimise those. I've written more about this in connection to Ted Sider, who is (I think) more brazen than Lewis, but whose way of doing philosophy can be seen as legitimised by Lewis's way of doing philosophy:
lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/index.php/2020/04/12/ted-sider-on-vagueness-logic-and-reality/
@@VictorGijsbers I was planning on purchasing Sider's recent coauthored book "Riddles of Existence" since I am a novice in metaphysics. I thought it would be useful to study. But if it is as you say that Lewisians like Sider don't profit from history of philosophy, even though they should at least try, then I might consider a different text that is less ahistorical. I was hoping that an introductory analytic metaphysics text would be historically grounded somewhat. I would think that gives anyone interested in philosophy a better, more good-faith understanding.
I haven't read that particular book of Sider's, but I have no doubt that he is good and often even very good when he explains contemporary analytic metaphysics (of a particular kind). So it definitely won't be time wasted! One possibility for a very historical approach is Adrian Moore's book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, but it's relatively advanced and goes very quickly. Lowe's book A Survey of Metaphysics is also very good, though again not very historical. There are no doubt many other books I haven't perused!
Its still a chaldean mind model. You begin trapped in the universe is God line of thought mapping that eastern philosophy ends in and western Europe takes into materialism.
Darwin uses the argument structure and of course multi verse uses.
Far from a classical American mind actually working from individual non locality realism which is all encompassing much more complex way of rationalizing the world around us.
It would invoke time on inertia mach principle play survive in newtonian statistical probability thats constantly changing needing anylitical corrections.
Time and place applications of approximation onto a paradoxical world around us.
Man made language, math & time inspired by God legable left over fingerprints in universe and a mind that can read it.
Very different from God is universe in a rock thought
Great reconstruction! Does Lewis’s modality relate in any way to philosophical hermeneutics and critical theory - the self-contained world of the text, world made possible by the text etc?
Not in any overt way! Lewis has many qualities, but reading outside a relatively narrow range of authors isn't one of them. There's no connection made to continental authors or to the history of philosophy.
I would love if you expounded more on the philosophers paradise... is it Platonic?
I haven't looked back at the text right now, but I assume Lewis is alluding to Hilbert's claim that the universe of set theory is a paradise for the mathematicians. In the same way, the universe of possible worlds is supposed to be a paradise for the philosopher!
@@VictorGijsbers Interesting and informative talk. I have some small background in philosophy but Lewis is brand new to me. You have provided a good introduction to his thinking (at least parts of it) and more than enough to get me to read what he wrote, argue for and against it, and then try to think of something that might be (LOL) better. Just read Carlo Rovelli's brief discussion of Nagarjuna, so I wonder if I can piece of together anything from that with what you spoke about.
But it's almost midnight, so I'm probably on a real fool's errand. Thanks and
All best wishes,
Tom Mollo
Loved the lecture!
have you finished your essay? if so, can i read it?
You sir are a legend
How do we know if this is a legitimate question? What leads someone to think the world (the whole) is optional?
What
I remember reading David Lewis' obituary in the NYT...I had never heard of him before. The obit said his ideas meant, to him at least, that the literary world of Tolkien and the tv world of Star Trek really did physically exist, somewhere. Is this a true implication of hi thought or a bad interpretation ? Thanks.
They only exist if they're possible. Not sure if either of these worlds are! Otherwise, it's fair to say that Lewis believes in the reality of all possible worlds. (But they are utterly inaccessible to us.)
Yes, it's a true implication. There is nothing philosophically impossible about those worlds.