Existence and Explanation

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. On (The X) (X = Lambert)

   • Bas C. Van Fraassen

   Pages 1-18

3. Five Easy Pieces

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 19-24

4. The Cartesian Cogitos

   • Gordon G. Brittan Jr.

   Pages 25-38

5. Undefined Definite Descriptions

   • Charles B. Daniels

   Pages 39-44

6. Maximum Entropy Updating and Conditionalization

   • Daniel Hunter

   Pages 45-57

7. Leibniz on Ens and Existence

   • Wolfgang Lenzen

   Pages 59-75

8. Colours, Corners and Complexity: Meinong and Wittgenstein on Some Internal Relations

   • Kevin Mulligan

   Pages 77-101

9. Atomic Sentences as Singular Terms in Free Logic

   • Terence Parsons

   Pages 103-113

10. EPR-Situation and Bell’s Inequality

    • Erhard Scheibe

    Pages 115-129

11. On Being Spread Out in Time: Temporal Parts and the Problem of Change

    • Peter M. Simons

    Pages 131-147

12. Stability and Chance

    • Brian Skyrms

    Pages 149-163

13. A Reason for Explanation: Explanations Provide Stable Reasons

    • Wolfgang Spohn

    Pages 165-196

14. The Systems of Plato and Aristotle Compared as to Their Contributions to Physics

    • Jules Vuillemin

    Pages 197-206

15. A Note on Aristotle’s Theory of Definition and Scientific Explanation

    • Paul Weingartner

    Pages 207-217

16. Actualism, Free Logic and First-Order Supervaluations

    • Peter W. Woodruff

    Pages 219-231

17. Back Matter

    Pages 233-247

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This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order - with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, being about the earliest student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this helps to understand natural language.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Plato
• logic

• University of Bielefeld, Germany

  Wolfgang Spohn

• Princeton University, USA

  Bas C. Fraassen

• University of California at Irvine, USA

  Brian Skyrms

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