Metaphysics, Meaning, and Modality

This book is the first edited collection of papers on the work of one of the most seminal and profound contemporary philosophers. Over the last five decades, Kit Fine has made thought-provoking and innovative contributions to several areas of systematic philosophy, including philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as to a number of topics in philosophical logic. These contributions have helped reshape the agendas of those fields and have given fresh impetus to a number of perennial debates. Fine's work is distinguished by its technical sophistication, philosophical breadth, and independence from current orthodoxy. A blend of sound common-sense combined with a virtuosity in argumentation and constructive thinking is part and parcel of Kit Fine's lasting contributions to current trends in analytic philosophy.
Researchers and students in philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science will benefit alike from these critical contributions to Fine's novel theories on meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality, and will come away with a better understanding of the issues within contemporary analytic philosophy with which they deal.

Mircea Dumitru is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest. He is also Rector of the University of Bucharest and Visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University. He has previously held the position of President of the European Society of Analytic Philosophy and is currently the President of the International Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.

- Kit Fine: A Philosopher's Philosopher - I Metaphysics - 1: Fred Kroon and Jonathan McKeown-Green: Ontology: What's the (Real) Question? - 2: Philip Percival: Beyond Reality? - 3: Joseph Almog: One Absolutely Infinite Universe to Rule Them All: Reverse Reflection, Reverse Metaphysics - 4: Alasdair Urquhart: Fine on Arbitrary Objects - 5: Gabriel Sandu: Indefinites, Skolem Functions, and Arbitrary Objects - 6: Kathrin Koslicki: Essence and Identity - 7: Kit Fine: Indeterminate Identity, Personal Identity and Fission - 8: Graeme Forbes: Fine's New Semantics of Vagueness - II Modality - 9: Steven T. Kuhn: Necessary, Transcendental, and Universal Truth - 10: Gideon Rosen: What is Normative Necessity? - 11: Bob Hale: The problem of de re modality - 12: Penelope Mackie: Can Metaphysical Modality be Based on Essence? - 13: Fabrice Correia: More on the Reduction of Necessity to Essence - 14: Jessica Wilson: Essence and Dependence - 15: Scott Shalkowski: Essence and Nominalism - 16: Robert Goldblatt: Fine's Theorem on First-Order Complete Modal Logics - III Language - 17: Gary Ostertag: Fine on Frege's Puzzle - 18: Paolo Bonardi: Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirement - 19: Friederike Moltmann: Variable Objects and Truth-Making - IV Kit Fine's Responses - Publications of Kit Fine