The actual and the possible: modality and metaphysics in modern philosophy, edited by M. Sinclair, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, 256 pp., £50.00, ISBN 9780198786436

Abstract

This new collection comprises nine essays offering a wide array of views on modal metaphysics. One of the aims of the collection is to provide a recent survey of modal theories from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. The book presents ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ theories in modal metaphysics, with many diversely interpreted subjects, including the subjectivity and objectivity of modalities and the notion of possibility that was a focus of seventeenth- to twentieth-century modal metaphysics. The book provides interpretations of modal theories and responses to more contemporary issues, such as the (ir)reducibility of modal categories. The essays take diverse approaches, with some more exegetical and some engaging critically with the literature. Here I consider four essays within the volume that exemplify these approaches.