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Actuality and Possibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

W. E. Morris
W. E. Morris
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Extract

Philosophy, according to a prominent conception of its nature and method, consists primarily of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Because the relations between concepts are logical, and because the propositions which express them are necessary, philosophy is taken to be an a priori activity.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 55 , Issue 211 , January 1980 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

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References

1 White, Alan R., ‘Conceptual Analysis’, Bontempo, and Odell, (eds) The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 103–104.Google Scholar

2 Bambrough, Renford, ‘Principia Metaphysica’, Philosophy 39, No. 148, (1964), 104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For a discussion of some of these issues, with reference to the relevant physics texts, see Earman, John, ‘Causation: A Matter of Life and Death’, Journal of Philosophy 73, No. 1, (1976) 5–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Though I do consider these and other related questions in a further essay on this topic, ‘Actuality and Necessity’, forthcoming.

5 Of course, propositions concerning logical possibility will be necessary only if one accepts that the system S5 correctly reflects our pre-formal intuitions concerning modal notions. I discuss this in detail in the paper just mentioned in fn. 4. I do not raise the issue here since those whose arguments I shall be considering do accept that propositions of logical possibility are necessary.

6 Lewy, Casimir, Meaning and Modality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 48–49.Google Scholar

7 Lewy, , op. cit., 49.Google Scholar

8 Mind (1961), 187–200.Google Scholar References hereafter inserted parenthetically into the text. Other versions of this argument can be found in Newell, R. W., The Concept of Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1967), 37 ff.Google Scholar, and in Hanson, Norwood Russell, ‘It's Actual, So It's Possible’, Philosophical Studies 10, (1959), 69–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 This paper was much improved by the constructive criticism of James Cargile, Donald Gustafson, Ian Hacking, Lawrence Jost, Eric Melvin, and Robert Richardson.

My research was supported by a grant from the Taft Faculty Committee of the University of Cincinnati; their generous assistance is gratefully acknowledged.