Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 15th, 2011
Benjamin Jarvis and I have been working for some time now on a book manuscript on mental content, rationality, and the epistemology of philosophy. I posted a TOC of our first draft last summer. Since then, we’ve received some helpful comments from reviewers, and have revised extensively; we now have a full new draft, which [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 27th, 2010
I’ve just uploaded a new draft of my paper on modals and modal epistemology. (I posted an earlier draft a few weeks ago.) If anyone’s interested, it’s here: Modals and Modal Epistemology Comments are extremely welcome. I hope to submit it soon, so if you wanted to provide feedback in the next week or so, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 24th, 2010
I’ve just completed a draft of a new paper on modals and modal epistemology, developing some of the ideas in my last few blog posts, and engaging with Timothy Williamson’s discussion of counterfactuals and modal epistemology. Here’s the abstract: Modals and Modal Epistemology Abstract. I distinguish (§§1-2) two projects in modal epistemology, and suggest (§3) [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 19th, 2010
This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 8th, 2010
I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Aug 31st, 2010
As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting here much lately. That’s for a couple of reasons. One is that, as many of you will know, my personal life has lately been very exciting. Carrie Jenkins and I are recently engaged to be married. So that’s pretty awesome. It also means I’m spending a [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge, with Benjamin Jarvis. Forthcoming in Nous. How do we know what’s (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Kripke-Putnam considerations suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this [...]