Essence and Existence

Essays on Existence and Essence presents a series of writings--including several previously unpublished--by Bob Hale on the topics of ontology and modality. The essays develop and consolidate a number of themes central to his work and to contemporary metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. They display Hale's innovative approach to some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy, in dialogue (and, in some cases, in collaboration) with other leading philosophers. The notion of a definition is examined as it applies both to words--verbal definitions-and to things--real definitions--and the relations between these are brought out in order to address problems in the metaphysics of necessity and the semantics and epistemology of modality. Hale argues for an essentialist theory of the source of necessity and our knowledge of it, and provides rigorous and inventive responses to problems such a theory might face. This theoretical framework is applied to the recently influential truthmaking approach to semantics and logic, developing an exact truthmaker account of universal quantification and modal statements. Other topics covered include the Fregean theory of ontological categories, the status of second-order logic, the metaphysics of numbers, and the nature of analytic propositions. The volume opens with a substantial introduction by Kit Fine, providing a critical examination of Hale's philosophy, and closes with a complete bibliography of Hale's writings.

Bob Hale (1945-2017) taught at the universities of Lancaster, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Sheffield. His main research interests were in the foundations of mathematics, philosophy of logic and language, and metaphysics. From 1997 to 1999 he was a British Academy Research Reader, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2002-3 he was President of the Aristotelian Society, and from 2009 to 2011 was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. He is author of Abstract Objects (Blackwell 1987) and Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (Oxford 2013); and co-author of The Reason's Proper Study (Oxford 2001, with Crispin Wright). Jessica Leech was jointly awarded her doctorate from the University of Sheffield and the University of Geneva in 2011. She was a Junior Research Fellow at King's College Cambridge from 2011-12, then lectured philosophy at the University of Sheffield from 2012, before moving to lecture philosophy at King's College London from 2016. Her main research interests are primarily on issues to do with possibility and necessity, both in contemporary metaphysics and philosophical logic, and in Kant's work. She is co-editor of Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (Oxford 2018, with Ivette Fred-Rivera).

- Introduction (Kit Fine) - 1: Essence and Definition by Abstraction - 2: Essence and Existence - 3: The Problem of De Re Modality - 4: Ontology Deflated - 5: Ontological Categories and the Problem of Expressibility (with Øystein Linnebo) - 6: What Makes True Universal Statements True? - 7: Exact Truthmakers, Modality, and Essence - 8: S5 as the Logic of Metaphysical Modality: Two Arguments for and Two Arguments Against - 9: Relative Necessity Reformulated (with Jessica Leech) - 10: Definition, Abstraction, Postulation, and Magic - 11: Second-order Logic: Properties, Semantics, and Existential Commitments - 12: The Problem of Mathematical Objects - 13: Properties, Predication, and Arbitrary Sets - 14: Ordinals by Abstraction - 15: Bolzano's Definition of Analytic Propositions (with Crispin Wright) - Bibliography of the writings of Bob Hale