Modalities, Identity, Belief, and Moral Dilemmas

Michael Frauchiger, Michael Frauchiger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110429725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This volume opens up stimulating new perspectives on a broad variety of Barcan Marcus's concerns ranging from the systematic foundation and interpretation of quantified modal logic, nature of extensionality, necessity of identity, direct reference theory for proper names, notions of essentialism, second-order modal logic, modal metaphysics, properties and classes, substitutional and objectual quantification, actualism, the Barcan formula, possibilia and possible-world semantics to epistemic and deontic modalities, non-language-centered theories of belief, accounts of rationality, consistency of a moral code, moral dilemmas, and much more. The contributions demonstrate that Barcan Marcus's original and clear ideas have had a formative influence on the direction in which certain themes central to today's philosophical debate have developed. Furthermore, the volume includes an illuminating intellectual autobiography from Barcan Marcus herself as well as an informal interview containing her unfiltered, frank answers. The book brings together contributions by Ruth Barcan Marcus, Timothy Williamson, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Joëlle Proust, Pascal Engel, Edgar Morscher, Erik J. Olsson, and Michael Frauchiger.

Fußnoten

Proem: Highlighting Ruth Barcan Marcus’s Courageous Philosophical Life and Work

1	Cp. Barcan Marcus (2010), 90. (Also, this volume, 37.)
2	Cp. Lauener (1982), 11.
3	Barcan Marcus (1993), x.
4	Barcan Marcus (2010), 85. (Also, this volume, 29f.) – In this passage, Barcan Marcus tells of an almost legendary colloquium at Harvard in February 1962, of which she was apprehensive at t he t ime. In Quine’s s phere, she felt like her biblical namesake, standing in alien corn. Barcan Marcus there presented her paper “Modalities and Intensional Languages”, in conjunction with comments by Quine. Participating in the discussion following Barcan Marcus’s lecture w ere ( in a ddition to Quine and Barcan Marcus) Kripke, Føllesdal and McCarthy. (Cp. Barcan Marcus (1993), 3 , 222f.) – It is important to bring in, at this point, the perspective of Dagfinn Føllesdal, who had in the previous year submitted h is Ph.D. thesis to the Harvard Department of Philosophy. Føllesdal’s thesis advisor was Quine and yet Barcan Marcus’s innovative work in quantified modal logic was carefully and accurately discussed in his dissertation. Føllesdal’s recollections of the Harvard colloquium lecture by Barcan Marcus do not justify Ruth Barcan Marcus’s apprehensiveness of a lack of respect and inclusiveness for philosophical opponents within Quine’s sphere of influence at Harvard in those days. Towards the end of his contribution to this volume, “Ruth Marcus, Modal Logic and Rigid Reference”, Føllesdal writes: “Ruth describes in her book Modalities the discussion at Harvard in 1962 as if she were in a lion’s den, where she appreciated Saul Kripke’s support. She clearly believed that being a student of Quine I sided with Quine in his rejection of the modalities. (…) She might have been relieved in 1962, when she visited Harvard, if she had known that she had one more ally in that group”. (This volume, 47f).
5	At many points in her anthology of collected essays entitled Modalities, Barcan Marcus advocates a substitutional semantics for quantification. At one point, however, she acknowledges that objectual interpretation of quantification remains ultimately indispensable for possible-world semantics; for, even if substitutional quantifiers are used in quantified modal logic, objectual quantification is also required in the final analysis. On p. 213 of Barcan Marcus (1993), Marcus writes with regard to substitutional possible-world semantics: “Identity, which is a feature of objects, cannot be defined in such a semantics. Intersubstitutivity of syntactical items salva veritate does not generate objects, which must be given if identity is to hold. (…) Substitutional semantics may have some uses for nonobjectual discourse, but, as I now believe, only in conjunction with objectual quantification for the domain of actuals.” – So, on a substitutional interpretation of quantifiers, which d oes n ot a ssign any d omains t o possible worlds and, accordingly, no objects to names, the relation between linguistic expressions and actual objects in the world is neglected and left out of account.
6	Cp. e.g. Barcan Marcus’s illuminating paper “Possibilia and Possible Worlds”, in Barcan Marcus (1993), 189?213.
7	Barcan Marcus (1993), 204.
8	Barcan Marcus (1993), 207f.
9	Cp. Lauener (1999), 177.
10	Barcan Marcus (2010), 76. (Also, this volume, 19.)
11	Barcan Marcus (2010), 80f. (Also, this volume, 24.)
12	Barcan Marcus (2010), 86. (Also, this volume, 31f.)
13	Barcan Marcus (2010), 90. (Also, this volume, 36.)
14	Lauener (1999).
15	Barcan Marcus (2010), 82. (Also, this volume, 26.)
16	Cp. Barcan Marcus (1993), 89.
17	For example, Barcan Marcus’s remarkable paper “Classes, Collections, Assortments, and Individuals” (Barcan Marcus (1993), 89?100) had quite a protracted publication history. Marcus submitted it in 1965, but it was not published until 1974, when the journal’s [I quote] “patient editor presented me with an ultimatum” (p. 89). The d elay was due inter a lia to a prolonged [I quote] “struggle with arriving at a salient vocabulary for the distinctions I wanted to m ake among n otions t hat a re o ften c onflated i n v arying ways, such as attribute, class, collection, set, and what I have in the present paper called “assortment.”” (p. 89). This struggle for improved terminology indeed goes back to Marcus’s contribution to the influential 1962 Helsinki Colloquium on Modal and Many-Valued Logics. And that contribution of Barcan Marcus’s was in turn based on her early, pivotal studies of quantified modal logic; that is, her colloquium contribution was [I quote] “an application of “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication,” Journal of Symbolic Logic, XI (1946) and “The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus,” XII (1947)” (p. 97). – In the relevant Helsinki Colloquium paper, published in 1963, as well as in the abbreviated and improved 1974 and 1993 versions of it, Barcan Marcus has developed a still thought-provoking modal theory of classes, which takes into account that assortments, unlike classes, are not given by defining conditions for membership, but by inventory. She points out that a bracketed list of tags which designates an assortment does – analogously to the tags (i.e. genuine proper names of physical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Modalities, Identity, Belief, and Moral Dilemmas
• Contents
• Proem: Highlighting Ruth Barcan Marcus’s Courageous Philosophical Life and Work
• Laudatio: Ruth Barcan Marcus (1921–2012)
• A Philosopher’s Calling
• Ruth Marcus, Modal Logic and Rigid Reference
• Barcan Formulas in Second-Order Modal Logic
• Is Identity a Functional Property?
• Barcan Marcus on Belief and Rationality
• Ruth Barcan Marcus on Believing Without a Language
• Moral Dilemmas: From a Logical and from a Moral Point of View
• Interview with Ruth Barcan Marcus
• Contributors
• Index of Names
• Fußnoten