Conferenza organizzata dal Centre for Philosophy of Time

 

Christian Wüthrich (Geneva)

When the Actual World is Not Even Possible

 

10 febbraio 2017, ore 15:00-17:00

Sala Enzo Paci, Direzione del Dipartimento di Filosofia, Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano

 

La conferenza sarà tenuta in inglese.
La partecipazione all’incontro è fortemente consigliata consigliata agli allievi della Scuola di Dottorato in Filosofia e Scienze dell’Uomo.
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Organizzazione: Giuliano Torrengo and Samuele Iaquinto - Università degli Studi di Milano.

Project: LINEA 1B - UNIMI PER ERC (CUP: G45C16000000001)

 

Abstract

Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis’s analysis of modality. As Lewis’s possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime – if borne out – suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence – as opposed to the fundamentality – of spacetime must be recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis’s theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible.