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Jorge Luis Borges

  • "Under the trees of England I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth. I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."
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June 26, 2004

The World As Frankfurt-Type Case...

Well, not quite. But you might want to have a look at an interesting post by our very own Jonathan Kvanvig on, "Certain Doubts" (http://www.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/), called "Peeve and Proposal." The comments thread makes connections to general problems throughout philosophy, as noted by such philosohers as Shope. I raised some of these issues in a preliminary way in my book, The Metaphysics of Free Will; there I pointed out that Frankfurt-type cases are a special case of a much wider phenomenon--Schizophrenic Situations. Schizophrenic Situations are a kind of Swerve in Metaphysical Space, where counterfacutal analyses have troubles. It is interesting to note that formally the same, or similar, issues come up whenever one seeks to analyze some notion counterfactually (or in terms of certain sorts of subjunctive conditionals).

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