Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Counterfactuals by David Lewis ISBN: 0-631-22425-4 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: December, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Philosophical Analysis At Its Best
Comment: "Counterfactuals" is not for the kiddies, or even the "interested general reader", if such a person exists. It is a book by an analytic philosopher, for analytic philosophers. Even among them, it will interest only the mandarins, the true devotees of contemporary analytical metaphysics and modal logic. But, for that select audience, this book is a treasure. It is a paradigm of philosophical analysis, lucid, concise, rigorous, and informed throughout by a luminous clarity of vision. The book concerns itself with a single problem of fundamental philosophical interest and importance: what do counterfactual conditionals mean, and when are they true? And such is the author's consummate brilliance that he manages to solve this problem, in its essentials, in less than a hundred and fifty pages. In this review, I will not attempt to detail its contents, since Amazon already has information about that. I will simply give my own opinion of its significance. The reader who wants to know more should get a copy.
"Counterfactuals" is that rarest of things: a truly original philosophical work that actually *succeeds* in its stated aim. To my knowledge, the only person, in the whole history of philosophy, to have developed an even remotely similar approach to the problem of counterfactuals is Robert Stalnaker, and Lewis' work is I think indisputably superior, subsuming Stalnaker's approach as a special (and doubtful) case. (Both works were, historically speaking, made yesterday--a mere generation ago.) If I am right in thinking that Lewis' theory is substantially correct, then he would seem to be the first man in history to have achieved a philosophically adequate understanding of counterfactuals. This book, in my opinion, represents a fundamental breakthrough in logic and metaphysics, for which we owe its author a debt as great as that owed to Kripke, perhaps even comparable to that which mathematics and logic owe to the works of Frege.
 |
Title: On the Plurality of Worlds by David K. Lewis ISBN: 0631224262 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
 |
Title: Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology: Volume 2 by David Lewis ISBN: 0521587875 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 13 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
 |
Title: The Nature of Necessity (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy) by Alvin Plantinga ISBN: 0198244142 Publisher: Clarendon Pr Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
 |
Title: Conceivability and Possibility by Tamar Szabo Gendler, John Hawthorne, John O'Leary-Hawthorne ISBN: 0198250908 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
 |
Title: Philosophical Papers by David Lewis ISBN: 0195036468 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 1987 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
