Book contents
16 - Abstract and concrete
from PART IV - DE RERUM NATURA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
Many actualists claim that possible worlds are abstract, and so not as real as our actual ‘concrete’ world. And here we appear to have a mismatch, because the presentism/eternalism debate seems to pay little attention to the ontological status of times, and does not seem to be a debate in which the presentist holds that times are abstract and the eternalist holds that they are concrete. The fact that 8.15 pm, NZDT, on Friday 31 December 2004 might be an abstract, necessarily existent entity in no way lessens the physical reality of what is then happening. Nor would the fact that times are abstract entities suggest that any one time is a privileged ‘present time’. So it is by no means obvious that the debate between possibilists and actualists should be seen as a debate about whether worlds are concrete or abstract.
Still, actualists typically do seem to feel an obligation to give an ‘abstract’ analysis of worlds, and we shall examine some of the analyses that have been given, in terms of the temporal parallel. Stalnaker 2003, p. 28, speaks of a world as a ‘way things might be’, where the actual world is the way things are. On p. 27 he contrasts this with Lewis's ‘I and all my surroundings’ (Lewis 1973a, p. 86). Stalnaker describes a way things might be as a property or state of the world, not as a world itself.
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- The World-Time ParallelTense and Modality in Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 177 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012