Here is the rather delayed report on my second modality talk in Geneva. At the moment I am in Finland, but getting here was rather more difficult than it should’ve been, as I was stuck in London for two days. Anyway, all is well now, and I’m looking forward to going back to Durham in early January.

The slides from my second talk are available here. The slides from the first talk are still here. In the second talk I first covered what I call the conceptualist approach to modality very briefly, it is familiar from the work of Chalmers, Jackson and Sidelle. The main topic was the essentialist approach, mainly due to Fine and Lowe. I won’t go into details here, but basically I tried to motivate two things.

Firstly, we should reserve the term ‘metaphysical necessity’ for only those necessities which are not also conceptually or logically necessary, as Lowe has suggested in his The Possibility of Metaphysics.

Secondly, I think that the role of logical modality in the essentialist picture is debatable; specifically, if we take Fine’s arguments for the independence of natural and normative modality in his ‘The Varieties of Necessity’ seriously, we may have some good reasons to think that logical modality is independent as well. This is because there may be examples of logical necessities which are metaphysically contingent (for someone who thinks that alternative logics are metaphysically possible), and this would violate Fine’s requirement that to be able to subsume a type of necessity under metaphysical necessity, the necessity in question must also be metaphysically necessary. This may seem like a longshot, but I for one do take the metaphysical possibility of alternative logics seriously, or at least regard it as an open question.

Well, that’s that for now, but I do hope to develop the material that I covered in these two talks, and perhaps combine them into a survey paper for Philosophy Compass.