How Many Angels Can Dance on the Point of a Needle? Transcendental Theology Meets Modal Metaphysics

Mind 120 (477):53-81 (2011)
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Abstract

We argue that certain modal questions raise serious problems for a modal metaphysics on which we are permitted to quantify unrestrictedly over all possibilia. In particular, we argue that, on reasonable assumptions, both David Lewis's modal realism and Timothy Williamson's necessitism are saddled with the remarkable conclusion that there is some cardinal number of the form ℵα such that there could not be more than ℵα-many angels in existence. In the last section, we make use of similar ideas to draw a moral for a recent debate in meta-ontology

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Author Profiles

Gabriel Uzquiano
University of Southern California
John Hawthorne
Australian Catholic University

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

Bare possibilia.Timothy Williamson - 1998 - Erkenntnis 48 (2-3):257--73.
What Is Classical Mereology?Paul Hovda - 2009 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (1):55 - 82.
How we learn mathematical language.Vann McGee - 1997 - Philosophical Review 106 (1):35-68.
Recombination unbound.Daniel Nolan - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 84 (2-3):239-262.
Bare possibilia.Timoti Vilijamson - 1998 - Theoria 41 (4):83-98.

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