An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is allowed, forbidden, required, or obligatory, in view of the requirements of morality, the law, one's preferences or goals, or what an authority has commanded: in short, deontic moda...(展开全部)

This is a book about semantic theories of modality. Its main goal is to explain and evaluate important contemporary theories within linguistics and to discuss a wide range of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of these theories. The introduction describes the variety of grammatical phenomena associated with modality, explaining why modal verbs, adjectives, and adverbs re...(展开全部)

This is a book about semantic theories of modality. Its main goal is to explain and evaluate important contemporary theories within linguistics and to discuss a wide range of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of these theories. The introduction describes the variety of grammatical phenomena associated with modality, explaining why modal verbs, adjectives, and adverbs re...(展开全部)

Kit Fine has, since the 1970s, been one of the leading contributors to work at the intersection of logic and metaphysics. This is his eagerly-awaited first book in the area. It draws together a series of essays, three of them previously unpublished, on possibility, necessity, and tense. These puzzling aspects of the way the world is have been the focus of considerable philosoph...(展开全部)

Modality: A History provides readers a sweeping study of the history of philosophical work on modal concepts. Everyday discourse is saturated with appeals to what might be the case or to what must be true or to what cannot happen. Possibility, necessity, and impossibility are modal terms, and philosophers have long wondered how to best understand them. This volume traces the hi...(展开全部)

The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions--are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be explained in other terms? This volume presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers. Between them, the papers address fundamental ...(展开全部)

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn; an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree. Barbara Vetter investigates the metaphysics of such potentials, and develops a dispositionalist view of metaphysical modality which takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals...(展开全部)

Nahum Brown is a lecturer in philosophy at Miyazaki Interantional College, Japan.

Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. Yablo offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the physical, mental causation, the possibility of disembodied existence, the relation between conceivability and possibility, var...(展开全部)