id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
work_qifj576xwbfavn5hzm3ox3gh7u	Jeremy Butterfield	David Lewis Meets Hamilton and Jacobi	2004	11	.pdf	application/pdf	5173	457	75	I commemorate David Lewis by discussing an aspect of modality within analytical mechanics, which is closely related to his work on counterfactuals. concerns the way Hamilton-Jacobi theory uses ensembles, i.e. sets of possible 1) I shall consider only a very limited class of classical mechanical systems, and assume knowledge of how analytical mechanics treats them (Section 2). 3) This modal involvement, and others, are entangled, technically and philosophically, with the fact that analytical mechanics provides general schemes for solving and rest of the paper concentrates on the �rst grade, which considers counterfactual initial and/or �nal conditions, but keeps �xed the forces on the system and the laws of It is strikingly illustrated by Hamilton-Jacobi theory's S-function, which represents a structured ensemble of such conditions. of S-functions)|and so the modal involvements of Hamilton-Jacobi theory. solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi initial value problem, each such function determines|	./cache/work_qifj576xwbfavn5hzm3ox3gh7u.pdf	./txt/work_qifj576xwbfavn5hzm3ox3gh7u.txt