2025.02.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Yitzhak Melamed and Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A History, Oxford University Press, 2024, 360pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780190089863.
Reviewed by Martin Vacek, Slovak Academy of Sciences
The problem of modality and specifically the truth of modal claims, the source of modal knowledge, and the metaphysical status of modal facts has engaged philosophers since the beginning of speculative reasoning. Modality has been deeply analysed from various theoretical perspectives. Each puts forth distinct philosophical assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality, along with the roles these assumptions play in revealing modal reality. One might naturally assume that the theoretical rigor with which problems of modality are approached today rests solely on the development and use of formal methods in contemporary philosophy. However, it is surprising to observe that many breakthroughs in the metaphysics of modality occurred long before the formal methods of analytic philosophy. These breakthroughs reveal that foundational insights into the nature of…
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