Abstract

From the very dawning of philosophy in the days of the Presocratics, reasoning by means of counterfactual conditionals has played a prominent role in this domain. Xenophanes of Colophon already resorted to the explanatory use of counterfactual thought experiments as the following passage shows: "But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, then horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves." This style of reasoning may be depicted as follows