Wilson, A. orcid.org/0000-0003-3027-5016 (2022) Necessity First. Argumenta (14). pp. 309-322. ISSN 2465-2334
Abstract
My topic in this paper is the relationships of metaphysical priority which might hold between the different alethic modal statuses—necessity, contingency, possibility and impossibility. In particular, I am interested in exploring the view that the necessity of necessities is ungrounded while the contingency of contingencies is grounded—a scenario I call ‘necessity first’. I will explicate and scrutinize the contrast between necessity first and its ‘contingency first’ contrary, and then compare both views with ‘multimodal’ and ‘amodal’ alternatives, drawing on David Lewis’s modal realism and Barbara Vetter’s potentialism as example cases. I will then defend the necessity-first point of view from a reversed version of Blackburn’s classic dilemma against theories of the source of necessity.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0). |
Keywords: | Contingency, grounding, Modality, Necessity, possibility |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Nov 2023 13:57 |
Last Modified: | 13 Nov 2023 14:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Università degli Studi di Sassari |
Identification Number: | 10.14275/2465-2334/202214.wia |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:205105 |
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