Phenomenological Actualism. A Husserlian Metaphysics of Modality?

Considering the importance of possible-world semantics for modal logic and for current debates in the philosophy of modality, a phenomenologist may want to ask whether it makes sense to speak of “possible worlds” in phenomenology. The answer will depend on how "possible worlds" are to be interpreted. As that latter question is the subject of the debate about possibilism and actualism in contemporary modal metaphysics, my aim in this paper is to get a better grip on the former question by exploring a Husserlian stance towards this debate. I will argue that the phenomenologist’s way to deal with the problem of intentional reference to mere possibilia is analogous to the actualist’s idea of how “possible worlds” are to be interpreted. Nevertheless, I will be pointing to a decisive difference in the metaphilosophical preconditions of what I call "phenomenological actualism" and analytical versions of actualism

The ground of ground, essence, and explanation

This paper is about the so-called meta-grounding question, i.e. the question of what grounds grounding facts of the sort ‘φ is grounded in Γ ’. An answer to this question is pressing since some plausible assumptions about grounding and fundamentality entail that grounding facts must be grounded. There are three different accounts on the market which each answer the meta-grounding question differently: Bennett’s and deRosset’s “Straight Forward Account” (SFA), Litland’s “Zero-Grounding Account” (ZGA), and “Grounding Essentialism” (GE). I argue that if grounding is to be regarded as metaphysical explanation (i.e. if unionism is true), (GE) is to be preferred over (ZGA) and (SFA) as only (GE) is compatible with a crucial consequence of the thought that grounding is metaphysical explanation. In this manner the paper contributes not only to discussions about the ground of ground but also to the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between ground, essence, and explanation

Lattice paths of slope 2/5

We analyze some enumerative and asymptotic properties of Dyck paths under a line of slope 2/5.This answers to Knuth's problem \\#4 from his "Flajolet lecture" during the conference "Analysis of Algorithms" (AofA'2014) in Paris in June 2014.Our approach relies on the work of Banderier and Flajolet for asymptotics and enumeration of directed lattice paths. A key ingredient in the proof is the generalization of an old trick of Knuth himself (for enumerating permutations sortable by a stack),promoted by Flajolet and others as the "kernel method". All the corresponding generating functions are algebraic,and they offer some new combinatorial identities, which can be also tackled in the A=B spirit of Wilf--Zeilberger--Petkov{\v s}ek.We show how to obtain similar results for other slopes than 2/5, an interesting case being e.g. Dyck paths below the slope 2/3, which corresponds to the so called Duchon's club model.Comment: Robert Sedgewick and Mark Daniel Ward. Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO)2015, Jan 2015, San Diego, United States. SIAM, 2015 Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO), eISBN 978-1-61197-376-1, pp.105-113, 2015, 2015 Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO