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Two Concepts of Possible Worlds – or Only One?
Author(s) -
BENOVSKY JIRI
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
theoria
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1755-2567
pISSN - 0040-5825
DOI - 10.1111/j.1755-2567.2008.00027.x
Subject(s) - possible world , epistemology , modal , philosophy , chemistry , polymer chemistry
In his “Two Concepts of Possible Worlds” (1986), Peter Van Inwagen explores two kinds of views about the nature of possible worlds: abstractionism and concretism. The latter is the view defended by David Lewis, who claims that possible worlds are concrete spatio‐temporal universes, very much like our own, causally and spatio‐temporally disconnected from each other. The former is the view of the majority, who claim that possible worlds are some kind of abstract objects – such as propositions, properties, states of affairs or sets of numbers. In this paper, I will develop this view in an “extreme abstractionist” way, appealing to a “modal bundle theory”, and I will try to show that it is preferable to the standard abstractionist views. Finally, I will compare this kind of abstractionism to concretism, only to find that the difference between the two is minimal.