This event will take place in person.
There are many philosophical questions that I wish I could ask David Lewis. Several of them concern counterfactuals, which he famously analysed and often appealed to in his work. They include the following:
- At points in your writings you came tantalisingly close to the view that most counterfactuals are false. Why didn’t you take the extra step and endorse the view?
- You were a contextualist about counterfactuals, yet that seems in tension with various things that you said. How much of a contextualist were you?
- You were not a contextualist at all about indicative conditionals. Why did you give such different analyses of counterfactuals and indicative conditionals?
- I also have some questions about the logic of counterfactuals, concerning their antecedents. What do you make of objections to your treatment of antecedent strengthening, simplification of disjunctive antecedents, counterfactuals with true antecedents, and counterfactuals with impossible antecedents?
I did get to ask David why he liked Australia so much, and I will share his answer.
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