Absences as Latent Potentialities

Philosophical Papers 45 (3):401-435 (2016)
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Abstract

Absences, i.e., agential omissions and forbearances, but also ‘natural’ negative states and events beyond the sphere of human agency, seem to be part and parcel of the real world. Yet, it is exactly the putative reality of absences that strikes many philosophers as utterly mysterious, if not entirely unintelligible. As a promising approach towards solving the problem of real absences, I wish to explore the idea that absences are latent potentialities. To this end, I shall investigate what potentialities are, what kinds of potentiality exist, and what it means for a potentiality to remain latent. I will also discuss whether the framework of latent potentiality is able to meet the extensional constraints imposed on the theory of absences by our intuitions about the reach of negative acts and events, i.e., whether latent potentialities can account for all real absences.

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David Hommen
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Citations of this work

Making Sense of Negative Properties.David Hommen - 2017 - Axiomathes 28 (1):81-106.
Aesthetic Absence and Interpretation.David Fenner - forthcoming - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2):162-175.
Negative Properties—Negative Objects?David Hommen - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (4):395-412.

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Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 36 (3):602-605.
The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David K. Lewis - 1976 - American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2):145-152.
Contrastive causation.Jonathan Schaffer - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (3):327-358.
Impossible Worlds: A Modest Approach.Daniel Nolan - 1997 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 (4):535-572.

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