Mini-Seminor1

Speaker: Shimpei Endo (University of Amsterdam)
Date and Time: 25th of June (Tue.), 10:30-12:00
Venue: Economic Research Building(4F, Room 424), Osaka City University 
Title: Worlds (and Time) are Somewhere: Modal Spatialism and Its Temporal Analogy
 

Concerning the metaphysical status of possible worlds, abstractionists and concretists have disputed for some decades. Abstractionists like Stalnaker argue that possible worlds exist but as abstract entities while concretists insist that they should be as concrete as our actual world and its residents.
This talk begins with a quick review of the history of modal philosophy up to concrete modal realism. Then I will show several unsolved problems of concretism and introduce my metaphysical stance --spatialism as a way to overcome such difficulties.
Spatialism (with respect to modality) is a metaphysical stance claiming that possible worlds are spatial hence concrete and located in a space.
After introducing the fundamental idea of spatialism, this talk focuses on the spatiality of time.
In fact, when pre-spatialists (such as modal dimensionalist Yagisawa) talk about modal space, they often rely on the analogy of temporal dimension as an extra one to spatial ones. I will discuss further similarities between temporality and modality, claiming that both can be reduced to spatial notions.