![]() Philosophers make use of the notion of possible worlds in all sorts of ways. ![]() There is no possible world where 2 + 2 = 5 or in which squares are round. Not everything is a possible world, though. (Naturally there will be some other differences that follow from this one.) We can imagine possible worlds that are even more different or less different in various ways – a possible world where the Allies lost World War II, a possible world in which human beings never existed, a possible world exactly like the actual one except that the book next to me sits a millimeter farther to the right than it actually does, and so forth. (Since it’s still morning, I won’t – I can wait an hour.) So, we might say that there is a possible world more or less like the actual world – Obama is still president, I still teach and write philosophy, and so forth – except that instead of writing up this blog post at this particular moment, I am pouring myself a Scotch. In the actual world I am writing up this blog post, but I could have decided instead to go pour myself a Scotch. ![]() As is typically done, we might think of a “possible world” as a complete way that things might have been. ![]() Alvin Plantinga famously defends a version of the ontological argument that makes use of the notion of possible worlds. ![]()
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