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On Where Things Could Be

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jeffrey Sanford Russell
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Abstract

Some philosophers respond to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against absolute space by appealing to antihaecceitism about possible worlds, using David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive system, it is difficult to understand what this doctrine amounts to or how it bears on the Leibnizian argument. In fact, the best way of making sense of the relevant kind of antihaecceitism concedes the main point of the Leibnizian argument, pressing us to consider alternative spatiotemporal metaphysics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 60 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Shamik Dasgupta, Jeremy Dolan, Tom Donaldson, Cian Dorr, Hartry Field, Kit Fine, Martin Glazier, Boris Kment, Tom Møller-Nielsen, Zee Perry, Oliver Pooley, Erica Shumener, Ted Sider, Olla Solomyak, Syman Stevens, Michael Strevens, Chris Timpson, David Wallace, Jennifer Wang, other participants of the Oxford philosophy of physics seminar and the Cooperative Research Network in Analytic Philosophy modality workshop, and a host of helpful anonymous reviewers. This essay overlaps with the third chapter of my dissertation, “Possible Worlds and the Objective World.”

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