Dear all, This Wednesday (the 10th), from 4.30 to 6.00pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room, we will have Associate Professor Penelope Mackie giving a talk entitled: 'Essentialism and Context-dependence: a New Argument against Lewisian Counterpart Theory'. The abstract for her talk can be found below. After Prof. Mackie's talk we will be going for dinner at a nearby restaurant. If you would like to join us (at your own expense), please email me by midday tomorrow: [email protected].
The full list of speakers for this term is now available here: https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Abstract: According to David Lewis’s counterpart theory, de re modal claims, including essentialist de re modal claims, are interpreted in terms of a counterpart relation that is a relation of similarity. Hence, according to Lewis, since similarity is context-dependent, these de re modal claims are also context-dependent. I argue that, however it may be with de re modal claims in general, essentialist de re modal claims are ‘absolute’ (context-invariant) rather than context-dependent, and that this spells trouble for the Lewisian interpretation of de re modality. My argument against Lewis differs from those of some other ‘absolutists’ about essentialist de re modality (notably L. A. Paul) in that it is compatible with a wide variety of views about which essentialist claims are the true ones, including my own ‘minimalist essentialism’. In addition, my argument against Lewis applies equally to his original (1968) version of counterpart theory, according to which de re modal predications are referentially transparent, and to its later variants (presented in ‘Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies’ (1971) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986)), according to which they are referentially opaque. I hope to see many of you there! NATHAN HAWKINS PhD student in Philosophy Cambridge University _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
