Existence and Explanation

This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order - with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, being about the earliest student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this helps to understand natural language.

Inhalt

On (the x) (x = Lambert).- Five Easy Pieces.- The Cartesian Cogitos.- Undefined Definite Descriptions.- Maximum Entropy Updating and Conditionalization.- Leibniz on Ens and Existence.- Colours, Corners and Complexity: Meinong and Wittgenstein on Some Internal Relations.- Atomic Sentences as Singular Terms in Free Logic.- EPR-Situation and Bell's Inequality.- On Being Spread Out in Time: Temporal Parts and the Problem of Change.- Stability and Chance.- A Reason for Explanation: Explanations Provide Stable Reasons.- The Systems of Plato and Aristotle Compared as to Their Contributions to Physics.- A Note on Aristotle's Theory of Definition and Scientific Explanation.- Actualism, Free Logic and First-Order Supervaluations.- Bibliography Of Karel Lambert.