Book contents
14 - Individuals and stages
from PART IV - DE RERUM NATURA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
At least one philosopher, David Lewis, has argued that no ordinary individual – as it might be no aspidistra, donkey or lampshade – can exist in more than one world. We will begin by quoting the first five sentences of Lewis 1986a.
The world we live in is a very inclusive thing. Every stick and every stone you have ever seen is part of it. And so are you and I. And so are the planet Earth, the solar system, the entire Milky Way, the remote galaxies we see through telescopes, and (if there are such things) all the bits of empty space between the stars and the galaxies. There is nothing so far away from us as not to be part of our world. Anything at any distance at all is to be included. (Lewis 1986a, p. 1)
By a possible world Lewis understands the following. Begin with a ‘thing’ x. Now consider something y such that x and y are both members of the same space–time system. Call x and y world-mates. A ‘world’ w is a maximal entity such that all w's parts are world-mates, and any world-mate of any part of w is also a part of w. This is sometimes put by saying that worlds are mereological sums of world-mates – mereology being simply the formal theory of the part–whole relation. Lewis's philosophy has met with what he calls ‘incredulous stares’ (Lewis 1973a, p. 86; Lewis 1986a, p. 133) because of his view that other possible worlds are just like that except for being spatio-temporally disconnected from ours.
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- The World-Time ParallelTense and Modality in Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 155 - 165Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012