William G. Lycan offers a fresh approach to the long-running debate among philosophers and logicians about the best way to analyse and understand conditional sentences. Lycan attends not just to the semantics of such sentences, but equally to their syntax, making use of insights from linguistic theory. Real Conditionals is the definitive presentation of Lycan's view, written in his characteristically lively style.

William Lycan is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina.

• Preface, Acknowledgements


• 1: The Syntax of Conditional Sentences


• 2: Truth Conditions: The Event Theory


• 3: Truth Conditions: Reality and Modus Ponens


• 4: In Defense of Truth-Value


• 5: A Beautiful But False Theory of 'Even If'


• 6: An Unbeautiful But Less Easily Refuatable Theory of 'Even If'


• 7: The 'Indicative'/'Subjunctive' Distinction


• 8: The Riverboat Puzzle


• Appendix: 'Nonconditional Conditionals' (with Michael L. Geis)


• Revisionary Postscript on Nonconditional Conditionals


• Bibliography, Index