Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis [Book Review]

Philosophical Review 112 (2):263-266 (2003)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

David Lewis’s work in the past few decades produced a powerful and thought-provoking system, and this collection of eleven essays represents state-of-the-art engagement with that system across a range of topics. The title would suggest that the papers would deal in particular with Lewis’s doctrine of Humean supervenience, the doctrine that all the contingent truths are ultimately determined by instantiations of fundamental categorical properties at points of space-time, and the spatiotemporal relationships between those instantiations: that everything in our world supervenes on “local, particular matters of fact.” It is a bold philosophical program, with a reductionist approach to our everyday theoretical commitments and a goal of explaining the connections between the mental and the physical, laws and regularities, causes and effects, and chances and their outcomes, all without “necessary connections between distinct existences.” It is a program that many philosophers believe deserves attention in detail, even if many would wish to dispute parts of the picture. Indeed, Lewis himself does not so much defend Humean supervenience outright as argue that it need not be given up on philosophical grounds —in principle the materials allowed by Lewis would be enough to enable the world to contain such things as minds, causation, people, and languages; and in principle, Lewis claims, his Humean world has everything needed for truths of counterfactual conditionals and statements of objective chances. Lewis leaves open the question of whether physics in fact delivers us such a sparse world, but he thought that the lessons of his in-principle defense of Humean supervenience would carry over to a system including whatever fundamental physical posits will be eventually settled upon by science.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

"Humean" Supervenience?G. Oppy - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 101 (1):77-105.
Time Travel Fiction.John Bigelow - 2001 - In Gerhard Preyer & Frank Siebelt (eds.), Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 57--91.
Relational Holism and Humean Supervenience.George Darby - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (4):773-788.
Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
The big bad bug: What are the humean's chances?John Bigelow, John Collins & Robert Pargetter - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3):443-462.
Goodbye, Humean Supervenience.Troy Cross - 2012 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 7:129-153.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-09-12

Downloads
77 (#196,770)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Daniel Nolan
University of Notre Dame

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references