The Actual World

2015 ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Donald Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
The World

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory of the actual world as the best of all possible worlds. The chapter opens with Leibniz’s response to the two most basic questions of metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? And, why do certain things exist while other equally possible things do not? It examines Leibniz’s critique of Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics, with particular reference to the argument that God must make a choice among possible worlds because not all possibles are “compossible.” In addition, it explores Leibniz’s claim that the best of all possible worlds is the world containing the highest level of perfection or reality, intelligibility, order, and harmony. The chapter concludes by looking at three theological doctrines underlying Leibniz’s conception of the best of all possible worlds: divine creation, conservation, and concurrence.

The World Essence

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Joint Paper ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

scholarly journals Induction and Natural Kinds Revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 284-300
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Problem Of Induction ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Dispositional Essentialism ◽  
Previous Account

Howard Sankey reconsiders a special issue closely connected with causal powers—the problem of induction. He addresses a deep version of problem of circularity originally raised by Psillos, and argues that the circularity can be avoided. The key is recognizing certain epistemically externalist results of the Megaric consequences of the commitment to dispositional essentialism. Circularity can be avoided, Sankey argues, because it is the way the world is, rather than the inductive inference itself, that grounds the reliability of the inductive inference in his previous account. What are doing the work for Sankey here are the Megaric consequences of his adoption of Ellis’s dispositional essentialism. The uniformity in question is one that stretches across possible worlds: nature is uniform in the precise sense that there are natural kinds whose members all possess a shared set of essential properties. The significance of this commitment lies in how the possible and the temporal intersect through restrictions placed on the accessibility relation between the actual and the possible. Ipso facto, when considering questions about the future behaviours of objects, which is how Sankey understands the problem of induction to be, the uniformity of nature can ground the reliability of beliefs about those future behaviours precisely because the domain of possibility is restricted to those worlds accessible to the actual world, which is fixed by the commitments of dispositional essentialism.

Free Will and the Problem of Evil

1987 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Mason Myers
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Traditional Theist

Hume after arguing for the compatibility of liberty and necessity, a view now known as soft determinism or compatibilism, noted that it is not ‘possible to explain distinctly, how the Deity can be the mediate cause of the actions of sin and moral turpitude’. It seems that Hume is correct if the explanation must show specifically why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity must permit certain actions that to human reason seem to be unnecessary evils. On the other hand if such specifity is not required, the soft determinist who also happens to be a theist can argue that it is possible that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds even though the reason for any specific apparent evil cannot be known. If seemingly evil choices are free in the soft determinist's sense but determined by an omnipotent and omniscient deity, then either that deity is not omnibenevolent or that deity has determined the world to have the maximum possible goodness through including seemingly evil choices in the scheme of things. Consequently if, as the traditional theist believes, the creator is omnibenevolent as well as omnipotent and omniscient, the occurrence of seemingly evil choices are necessary for maximizing the goodness of the whole.

This world, ‘Adams worlds’, and the best of all possible worlds

2003 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN GROVER
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Possible World ◽  
The World ◽  
Rule Out

‘Adams worlds’ are possible worlds that contain no creature whose life is not worth living or whose life is overall worse than in any other possible world in which it would have existed. Creating an Adams world involves no wrongdoing or unkindness towards creatures on the part of the creator. I argue that the notion of an Adams world is of little value in theodicy. Theists are not only committed to thinking that this world was created without wrongdoing or unkindness but also must rule out the possibility that the world might have been better had God not existed. Nor is there much reason, independent of the availability of a satisfactory theodicy, for believing that the actual world is an Adams world. The need for a theodicy constructed along Leibnizian lines, incorporating the claim that this world is the best possible, is thus reinforced.

Presence, Environment, and Sound and the Role of Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 667-681
Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keyword(s):  
Computer Games ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Sensory Input ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Dimension ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Person Shooter ◽  
Selection Of

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.

scholarly journals A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evaluative Terms ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

scholarly journals ¿El Brasil se encuentra aquí? La construcción de mundos posibles a través de la marca Brasil por jóvenes catalanes / Is Brazil Found Here? The construction of possible worlds through of the Brazil brand by young Catalans

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Adriano De Oliveira Sampaio ◽  
Inés Martins
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Brand Positioning ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
The World

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the sense production that a group of young Catalans came up with after seeing some advertising pieces about Brazil’s self-promotion campaign (2011-2014) abroad and after some posters’ presentations about the advertising campaign “Brazil. The world is here”. Discourse Analysis and focus groups were used as a technique to analyze and to collect the interviews. The results show us that the binomial similarity / difference - essential for a brand positioning construction - is practically non-existent in those campaigns, which causes a homogenization of them in several countries.RESUMENEl artículo se centra en el análisis sobre los significados que un grupo de jóvenes catalanes elaboran de las campañas turísticas de autopromoción de Brasil (2011-2014) en el exterior antes y después de la presentación de los carteles de la campaña publicitaria “Brasil. O mundo se encontra aquí”. Fueron utilizados el análisis del discurso y el focus-group como técnica de recolección de las entrevistas. Los resultados obtenidos nos han permitido comprobar que el binomio semejanza/diferencia –esencial para la construcción do posicionamiento de marcas- es prácticamente inexistente en las campañas analizadas, lo que provoca la homogenización de las campañas turísticas de diferentes países.

scholarly journals The Conditional Sink: Counterfactual Display in the Valuation of a Carbon Offsetting Reforestation Project

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Véra Ehrenstein ◽  
Fabian Muniesa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Carbon Offsetting ◽  
The World ◽  
Prospective Assessment ◽  
Change Mitigation

This paper examines counterfactual display in the valuation of carbon offsetting projects. Considered a legitimate way to encourage climate change mitigation, such projects rely on the establishment of procedures for the prospective assessment of their capacity to become carbon sinks. This requires imagining possible worlds and assessing their plausibility. The world inhabited by the project is articulated through conditional formulation and subjected to what we call “counterfactual display”: the production and circulation of documents that demonstrate and con!gure the counterfactual valuation. We present a case study on one carbon offsetting reforestation project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We analyse the construction of the scene that allows the “What would have happened” question to make sense and become actionable. We highlight the operations of calculative framing that this requires, the reality constraints it relies upon, and the entrepreneurial conduct it stimulates.

Uneasy Litter Mates: Population and Progress

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
New World ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Southern Iraq

In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus reported that there had been a time when a person could walk across North Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and be always in the shade of trees. No more: the land was well on the way to becoming the desert we know today. Herodotus generalized: "Man stalks across the landscape, and deserts follow in his footsteps." In the tenth century A.D., a Samanid prince identified four earthly paradises: the regions of Samarkand, southern Persia, southern Iraq, and Damascus. No one who has visited any of these sites now would dream of calling it a paradise. They have been cursed with wars, but warfare is only a secondary cause of their degradation. Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize—destroy—move on. When the Pollyannas write history they focus only on the first of these three actions, the desirable effects of which were most evident during the rapid colonization of the New World. In 1845 a now obscure American journalist coined a deathless phrase when he spoke of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." "Manifest destiny" is one of those catchphrases we love. We would not welcome the words of a journalist who identified colonization as but a prelude to destruction and abandonment. The restless "moving on" of the human species has depended on always having fresh land to move to. Optimists are not easily frightened by the results, of course: as late as 1980 one Pollyanna brightly explained how all turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds: "Each year deserts the world over engulf an area the size of Massachusetts. A great deal of land lost is agricultural. . . . Fortunately, however, land is always being replaced or coming under cultivation to make up for land lost." An ecologist—ever guided by the question "And then what?"—would insist on a clarification of the above quotation: Does "always" mean "forever"? If so, it implies that there are no limits to earthly space. It is not surprising that ecologists are not the most popular of people in a growth-oriented economy.

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