Naturalism: Modal and Spatiotemporal - Guest Lecture Professor Alastair Wilson (Birmingham)

Time and modality have classically been conceived as domains to be investigated a priori, drawing on either rational insight (perhaps in its contemporary guise, philosophical intuition) or transcendental reasoning. Even contemporary philosophers of physics fall back on a priori considerations when considering e.g. the range of possible spacetimes. Scientific investigation is given a minimal role in modal discovery, typically being restricted to identifying which of the a-priori-identified possibilities we inhabit. In this talk I offer an alternative, starting with a radically naturalistic account of the metaphysics of modality, and showing how it leads to a naturalistic modal epistemology for space and time.