Thesis

So here's the thesis (PDF, 250 pages, 1.7 MB and in German). I'm a little dissatisfied with the presentation: it shows that it was finished in a hurry. I will do some polishing before the obligatory publication, and I'd recommend not reading it through in its current state.

For the most part, the book is an overview of Lewis's philosophy, with an emphasis on metaphysics. I discuss Lewis's views on non-present times and non-actual worlds, on mathematics and properties, his physicalism and Humean Supervenience, and the basic framework of his philosophy of language. One aim of this is to ease the understanding of Lewis's positions by tracing out all the interconnections between his theories. More importantly, I try to show how the package can be broken up: that one can, for example, accept most of what Lewis says about language and laws of nature without accepting his modal realism and his doctrine of objective naturalness. There's also a rather lengthy discussion about methodology and the relationship between modal/metaphyical and analytical reduction.

I've posted most of the interesting bits in this weblog here while I was working on them, and I'll probably write two or three small papers (in English) about some of it in the coming months.

Comments

# on 10 November 2005, 21:50

many thanks for making that available. I flipped through it - decent reading has to wait until I manage to print it -; what first comes to mind: Think of publishing this as a book, it seems to be laid back and clear, not the fury of thought and "formulae" one finds sometimes in this part of the woods.

Congratulations and all that

M.

# on 11 November 2005, 16:21

Thanks, M.! As I said, I will post a more polished version of this soon (probably in January), so you might want to wait for that before printing.

# on 29 November 2005, 16:06

Dear Wo,

I sometimes (since about a year) read trough your weblog which is really interesting.
I want to congratulate you with your thesis! I hope one day I'll be able to read most of
it: I feel, right after my 30th birthday, still a beginner :-(
At this moment I'm translating Quine's `Word and Object' into Dutch (20 pages to go) so I'm at
least getting more used to the terminology :-) though the logical deductions sometimes puzzle me.

Regards,
Stefan
(Utrecht, Niederlande)

# on 08 July 2007, 16:25

Wodurch unterscheiden sich [Chalmers 1996a] und [Chalmers 1996b]?

# trackback from on 10 November 2005, 23:11

Jonathan Ichikawa has a paper up on truth in fiction defending strong authorial authority. Wo has posted his dissertation on Lewis, which looks incredibly interesting, but is in German. Wo wants to defend an even stronger thesis about the independence of various Lewisian theories. He thinks most of the stuff about language and laws is independent in principle from the modal realism and the theories of objective naturalness. I tend to agree about the modal realism, but I'm a little sceptical about the language. We've been having this debate in the comments of the Lewis blog, and Wo's position is stronger than I'd appreciated; I may have to reconsider this. Finally, I set up a bloglines account to track a bunch of philosophy blogs. If you want to follow the same blogs I do without having to go to the trouble of setting up or maintaining an account, you can...

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