On Necessary Individuals and Ways (sic!) for Them to Be: Celebrating 10-Year Anniversary of Modal Logic as Metaphysics

Abstract

Timothy Williamson, the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, is one of the leading figures in the contemporary analytic philosophy. His areas of research include philosophy of language, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. Professor Williamson has authored over two hundred articles and numerous books, including such modern classics as Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell 2007, 2 nd updated ed. 2021), and Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford, 2013).I had the pleasure to meet Professor Williamson at The 26 th Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference, and he kindly agreed to give an interview on matters of modality. The enjoyable and fruitful a few hourtalk that we had, which appears below slightly abridged, revolved around the history of modal logics, Saul Kripke and his works, the controversy between necessitists and contingentists, higher-order logics and metaphysics, and the influence of Modal Logic as Metaphysics.The interview was taken on a rainy afternoon on Monday, the 14 th of November 2022, at New College, Oxford.PG: Why do modal notions (necessity, possibility, etc.) play an important role in philosophical inquiries?TW: One simple thing to say is that philosophers typically want what they say to be necessarily, and not just accidentally or contingently, true. We can see that in the way that they take merely possible counterexamples to what they are saying very seriously and as potential objections. That would not be the case if philosophers were putting forward what they say simply as universal generalizations. So that is one generic reason why modality is important in philosophy.Another reason, I think, has to do with the fact that modality itself presents both epistemic and metaphysical challenges to philosophers -it is not clear what is the place of possibility in reality, and it is not clear how can we know about things which are non-actual. One can see how serious these challenges are by looking, for example, at how difficult itContents lists available at Vilnius University Press