Topics: Epistemology, History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophical logic
Keywords: Conceivability, David Hume, FDE., Impossible World, Possible World
The article looks at the structure of impossible worlds, and their deployment in the analysis of some intentional notions. In particular, it is argued that one can, in fact, conceive anything, whether or not it is impossible. Thus a semantics of conceivability requires impossible worlds.
Possibility has been a familiar character in Western philosophy since the inception of the discipline. Systematic ways of thinking about it are to be found in both of the first two great periods of logic: Ancient and Medieval. Witness Aristotle’s modal syllogistic and and its medieval developments, such as the doctrine of ampliation, and the notions of sensu composito and sensu diviso
˜