What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases,
none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn't have tails,
they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn't
they wouldn't be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of
thing that can give counterfactuals a bad name, as inhabitants of a
La La Land of the mind. On the other hand, counterfactuals do
useful service across a broad range of disciplines in both the
sciences and the humanities, including philosophy, history,
cosmology, biology, cognitive psychology, jurisprudence, economics,
art history, literary theory. They are also richly, albeit
sometimes treacherously, present in the everyday human realm of how
our lives are both imagined and lived: in the 'crossroads' scenario
of decision-making, the place of regret in retrospective
assessments of paths taken and not taken, and, at the outer limit,
as the wish not to have been born. Christopher Prendergast take us
on a dizzying exploratory journey through some of these
intellectual and human landscapes, mobilizing a wide range of
reference from antiquity to the present, and sustained by the
belief that, whether as help or hindrance, and with many variations
across cultures, counterfactual thinking and imagining are
fundamental to what it is to be human.
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