I’ve just started teaching a course entitled ‘Essence, Modality, Reality’ in Helsinki. It’s in English and open to graduate and undergraduate students. Some people have expressed interest in the syllabus, so I’m posting the provisional syllabus below. It’s rather demanding and I may in fact have to change it a little as I go on, but at least it gives you an idea about the themes and literature that I find interesting in this area at the moment. By the way, if you happen to be in Helsinki and are interested in attending the course, do get in touch with me (even if you’re not a student at the University). The course will run until Christmas.

Syllabus for the course ESSENCE, MODALITY, REALITY
University of Helsinki
Dr. Tuomas E. Tahko

For links to online versions of most of the articles and much more resources, see the PhilPapers Modality and Essentialism and De Re Modality categories (both of which I edit).

Meeting 1: Introduction
Outline of course, brief introduction to the notion of essence.

Meetings 2-3: Kripke-Putnam Essentialism
I expect that most will be familiar with the classics in this area, but if you haven’t read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and Putnam’s ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, now is the time! I will remind you of some key issues, but this course is not an introduction to the classics, but rather an overview of emerging work in essentialism and related topics.

Compulsory reading:
• H. Putnam (1990). ‘Is Water Necessarily H2O?’ In J. Conant (Ed.), Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University Press).

Suggested readings include:
• A. Bird (2009). ‘Essences and Natural Kinds.’ In R. Le Poidevin (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics (Routledge).
• S. Soames (2006). ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary Aposteriori.’ Philosophical Issues 16.
• N. Williams (2011). ‘Putnam’s Traditional Neo-Essentialism.’ The Philosophical Quarterly 61 (242).

Meetings 4-5: Natural Kind Essentialism
Natural Kind Essentialism has been a lively topic after Kripke and Putnam as well. In particular, there has been an abundance of (critical) input from philosophy of science. We’ll examine the prospects for scientifically motivated natural kind essentialism in biology, chemistry, and physics.

Compulsory reading:
• A. Bird and K. Hawley (2011). ‘What Are Natural Kinds?’ Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1).

Suggested readings include:
• A. Bird (2012). ‘Are Any Kinds Ontologically Fundamental?’ In T. E. Tahko (Ed.) Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (CUP).
• M. Devitt (2008). ‘Resurrecting Biological Essentialism.’ Philosophy of Science 75.
• E. J. Lowe (2011). ‘Locke on Real Essence and Water as a Natural Kind: A Qualified Defence.’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1).
• P. Needham (2011). ‘Microessentialism: What is the Argument?’ Noûs 45 (1).
• J. van Brakel (1986). ‘The Chemistry of Substances and the Philosophy of Mass Terms.’ Synthese 69.

Meetings 6-7: Essence and Modality
We will focus on non-modal accounts of essence and attempts to ground modality to essence, rather than the other way around. This approach has been defended by Kit Fine, E. J. Lowe, Scott Shalkowski, Fabrice Correia, David S. Oderberg, and myself. We’ll read Fine’s classic paper and discuss some more recent developments.

Compulsory reading:
• K. Fine (1994), ‘Essence and Modality.’ Philosophical Perspectives 8.

Suggested readings include:
• F. Correia (2011), ‘On the Reduction of Necessity to Essence.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3).
• E. J. Lowe (2008), ‘Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence.’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 83 (62).
• D. S. Oderberg (2011), ‘Essence and Properties.’ Erkenntnis 75 (1).
• L. A. Paul (2004), ‘The Context of Essence.’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82.
• S. Roca-Royes (2011), ‘Essential Properties and Individual Essences.’ Philosophy Compass 6/1.
• E. Zalta (2006), ‘Essence and Modality.’ Mind 115 (459).

Meetings 8-9: Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
One important, open question that we must discuss concerns the epistemology of essence and modality. We will look into this by analysing Timothy Williamson’s recent an account of modal epistemology in terms of counterfactuals. This alternative account attempts to avoid some of the mysteries of essentialism, and it has received a lot of critical attention.

Compulsory reading:
• T. Williamson (2007), ’Philosophical Knowledge and Knowledge of Counterfactuals’. Grazer Philosophische Studien. Or Chapter 5 of his The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007, Blackwell).

Suggested readings include:
• K. Fine (forthcoming). ‘Counterfactuals without Possible Worlds’, to appear in the Journal of Philosophy.
• S. Roca-Royes (2011). ‘Modal Knowledge and Counterfactual Knowledge’, Logique Et Analyse 54 (216).
• T. E. Tahko (2012), ’Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology’. Grazer Philosophische Studien 86.

Meetings 10-11: Essence and Ontological Dependence
In order to understand the role of essence in metaphysics, it is necessary to study the different kinds of relations that essences stand in. These can be grouped under the general title of ‘ontological dependence’. An overview of different kinds of ontological dependence, such as existential and essential dependence will be presented and some of their applications outlined.

Compulsory reading:
• R. Cameron (2008), ‘Turtles All the Way Down.’ The Philosophical Quarterly 58 (230).

Suggested readings include:
• F. Correia (2008), ‘Ontological Dependence.’ Philosophy Compass 3 (5).
• K. Koslicki (2012), ‘Essence, Necessity, and Explanation.’ In T. E. Tahko (Ed.), Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (CUP).
• K. Koslicki (2012), ’Varieties of Ontological Dependence.’ In Correia and Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical Grounding (CUP).
• E. J. Lowe (2009), ‘Ontological Dependence’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Meetings 12-13: Essence and Ground
The notion of ground is closely related to that of ontological dependence. It is a type of metaphysical explanation. One major theme on this course is whether and how modality might be grounded in essence. We will look into some of the latest research on this topic and discuss a number of applications of grounding.

Compulsory reading:
• P. Audi (2012), ‘A Clarification and Defence of the Notion of Grounding.’ In Correia and Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical Grounding (CUP).

Suggested readings include:
• F. Correia (ms.) ‘Metaphysical Grounds and Essence.’
• S. Dasgupta (ms.) ‘The Status of Ground.’
• K. Fine (2001), ’The Question of Realism.’ Philosophers Imprint.
• K. Fine (2010), ‘Some Puzzles of Ground.’ Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 51, no. 1.
• K. Fine (2012), ‘A Guide to Ground.’ In Correia and Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical Grounding (CUP).
• K. Fine (2012), ‘The Pure Logic of Ground’. Review of Logic, vol 5, no. 1.
• J. Schaffer (2009), ’On What Grounds What.’ In Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics (OUP).
• K. Trogdon (Forthcoming), ‘An Introduction to Grounding.’ In Hoeltje, Schnieder, and Steinberg (Eds.) Basic Philosophical Concepts (Philosophia Verlag, Munich).

I’m teaching a course on metametaphysics here in Helsinki, from October 31 until December 13. The course is aimed at advanced undergraduates, but is open to all students at the University of Helsinki. Well, for my part, it’s open to everyone who might fancy coming, but if you want credits you have to be enrolled. Anyway, I just thought I’d announce the course here in case people are interested in the syllabus, which I’ve just posted at the dedicated Metametaphysics Course Blog. I thought that the blog platform would be a nice way of sharing course information both amongst the enrolled students as well as anyone else who might be interested. I’ll post the lecture slides there after each lecture, and there’s already a provisional list of readings and a brief description of each topic that I’m planning to cover. It’s possible that I will also post other relevant material on the blog, such as links to current discussion on metametaphysics around the blogosphere. I may post another update here as well once the course gets going.

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.

I gave my first talk on the Varieties of Modality at the Problèmes de métaphysique seminar in Geneva last Thursday. It went fine and we had some good discussions, but it was really only an introductory talk, I’m hoping to get into more detail in my next talk. The seminar has a bit of a mixed audience — I understand that it is compulsory for the MA students, but many PhD students and some staff come as well. Generally the talks seem to be pitched much too high for MA students, so I tried to make mine a bit more accessible. Anyway, the discussion is (unfortunately) generally just between the speaker and a number of PhD students and staff.

In my first talk I covered what I call the Kripkean account of different types of modality, which views metaphysical possibility as a proper subset of conceptual/epistemic possibility. It’s not quite clear what Kripke thought about logical possibility, but at times it seems as if it’s co-extensive with metaphysical possibility. I also talked about what I call the conservative account, which is somewhat hostile towards the Kripkean account of metaphysical modality. I looked into Bob Hale’s 1996 paper Absolute Necessities, which I mentioned in a previous post as well. Hale argues that logical necessity is absolute and metaphysical necessity is relative, or at best they are equally strong. In the end I think that the conservative account is not in much tension with the Kripkean account though, because contrary to what Bob Hale claims, a friend of metaphysical modality can easily acknowledge that metaphysical necessity is relative. My slides from the first talk are available here.

Next week I will cover what I call the conceptualist approach and the essentialist approach.