Metaphysics, Meaning, and Modality: Themes from Kit Fine

✍ Scribed by Mircea Dumitru

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 532
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is the first edited collection of papers on the work of one of the most seminal and profound contemporary philosophers. Over the last five decades, Kit Fine has made thought-provoking and innovative contributions to several areas of systematic philosophy, including philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as to a number of topics in philosophical logic. These contributions have helped reshape the agendas of those fields and have given fresh impetus to a number of perennial debates. Fine's work is distinguished by its technical sophistication, philosophical breadth, and independence from current orthodoxy. A blend of sound common-sense combined with a virtuosity in argumentation and constructive thinking is part and parcel of Kit Fine's lasting contributions to current trends in analytic philosophy.

Researchers and students in philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science will benefit alike from these critical contributions to Fine's novel theories on meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality, and will come away with a better understanding of the issues within contemporary analytic philosophy with which they deal.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Kit Fine—A Philosopher’s Philosopher • Mircea Dumitru
I. Metaphysics
1. Ontology: What’s the (Real) Question? • Fred Kroon and Jonathan McKeown-Green
2. Beyond Reality? • Philip Percival
3. One Absolutely Infinite Universe to Rule Them All: Reverse Reflection, Reverse Metaphysics • Joseph Almog
4. Fine on Arbitrary Objects • Alasdair Urquhart
5. Indefinites, Skolem Functions, and Arbitrary Objects • Gabriel Sandu
6. Essence and Identity • Kathrin Koslicki
7. Indeterminate Identity, Personal Identity, and Fission • Kit Fine
8. Fine’s New Semantics of Vagueness • Graeme Forbes
II. Modality
9. Necessary, Transcendental, and Universal Truth • Steven T. Kuhn
10. What is Normative Necessity? • Gideon Rosen
11. The Problem of de re Modality • Bob Hale
12. Can Metaphysical Modality Be Based on Essence? • Penelope Mackie
13. More on the Reduction of Necessity to Essence • Fabrice Correia
14. Essence and Dependence • Jessica Wilson
15. Essence and Nominalism • Scott A. Shalkowski
16. Fine’s Theorem on First-Order Complete Modal Logics • Robert Goldblatt
III. Language
17. Fine on Frege’s Puzzle • Gary Ostertag
18. Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirements • Paolo Bonardi
19. Variable Objects and Truthmaking • Friederike Moltmann
IV. Kit Fine’s Responses
Comments on Fred Kroon and Jonathan McKeown-Green’s “Ontology: What’s the (Real) Question?” • Kit Fine
Comment’s on Philip Percival’s “Beyond Reality?” • Kit Fine
Comments on Joseph Almog’s “One Absolutely Infinite Universe to Rule Them All: Reverse Reflection, Reverse Metaphysics” • Kit Fine
Comments on Alasdair Urquhart’s “Fine on Arbitrary Objects” • Kit Fine
Comments on Gabriel Sandu’s “Indefinites, Skolem Functions, and Arbitrary Objects” • Kit Fine
Comments on Kathrin Koslicki’s “Essence and Identity” • Kit Fine
Comments on Graeme Forbes’s “Fine’s New Semantics of Vagueness” • Kit Fine
Comments on Steven T. Kuhn’s “Necessary, Transcendental, and Universal Truth” • Kit Fine
Comments on Gideon Rosen’s “What is Normative Necessity?” • Kit Fine
Comments on Bob Hale’s “The Problem of de re Modality” • Kit Fine
Comments on Penelope Mackie’s “Can Metaphysical Modality Be Based on Essence?” • Kit Fine
Comments on Fabrice Correia’s “More on the Reduction of Necessity to Essence” • Kit Fine
Comments on Jessica Wilson’s “Essence and Dependence” • Kit Fine
Comments on Scott Shalkowski’s “Essence and Nominalism” • Kit Fine
Comments on Robert Goldblatt’s “Fine’s Theorem on First-Order Complete Modal Logics” • Kit Fine
Comments on Gary Ostertag’s “Fine on Frege’s Puzzle” • Kit Fine
Comments on Paolo Bonardi’s “Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirements” • Kit Fine
Comments on Friederike Moltmann’s “Variable Objects and Truthmaking” • Kit Fine
Bibliography of the Publications of Kit Fine
Index