This Friday Nov 21, from 11:00am-1:00pm, the Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language will host a talk from Delia Graff Fara (Dept of Philosophy, Princeton University). The talk is entitled: “De-re Modality: Identity Theory versus Counterpart Theory”: the abstract is below. It will talk place in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center, which is in the basement of Social Sciences.
It is likely that Prof Fara will have time to meet with interested graduate students on Friday afternoon. Please let me know if you are interested in meeting with her.
Many philosophers deny certain intuitively eminently plausible identity claims: e.g., that a person is identical to her body, that a person's body is identical to the matter that makes it up, and that artifacts such as paper books and clay statues are identical to the paper and clay that compose them.
I present a counterpart-theory semantics for de-re modality that's devised in order to support certain metaphysical view about identity that many philosphers reject. I argue that the semantics is preferable to Lewis's version of counterpart theory in that it avoids many of the purely semantic (as opposed to metaphysical) problems with the theory
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