Talk: Andreas Stokke (Uppsala)
Location: Ludwigstr. 31, ground floor, Room 021.
25.01.2024 at 16:00
Title:
Actualism, Witnesses, and Iterated Modalities
Abstract:
Ontological Actualism is the view that absolutely everything actually exists. A well-known problem for this view is the so-called "McMichael Problem" challenging actualists to give satisfactory truth-conditions for statements involving iterated modalities, such as "Albert could have had a left-handed sister who could have been right-handed." I argue for a solution to this problem involving world-indexed descriptions, on which the actualist appeals to what has been called "ersatz individuals" that serve as witnesses to existential claims at non-actual worlds.