A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

Jonathan Bennett, who now lives on an island near Vancouver, British Columbia, was formerly Lecturer in Moral Science at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and then at Syracuse University. He has held visiting positions at Cornell, Michigan, Pittsburgh, and Princeton, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy.

1. Introduction; 2. The Material Condition: Grice; 3. The Material Condition: Jackson; 4. The Equation; 5. The Equation Attacked; 6. The Subjectivity of Indicative Conditionals; 7. Indicative Conditionals Lack Truth Values; 8. Uses of Indicative Conditionals; 9. The Logic of Indicative Conditionals; 10. Subjunctive Conditionals - First Steps; 11. The Competition for 'Closest'; 12. Unrolling from the Antecedent Time; 13. Forks; 14. Reflections on Legality; 15. Truth at the Actual World; 16. Subjunctive Conditionals and Probability; 17. 'Even If...'; 18. Backward Subjunctive Conditionals; 19. Subjunctive Conditionals and Time's Arrow; 20. Support Theories; 21. The Need for Worlds; 22. Relating the Two Kinds of Conditional; 23. Unifying the Two Kinds of Conditional; References; Index of Persons; Index of Topics