Past Event: ELLMM City: Timothy Williamson (Yale and Oxford)

Title: Essence, Modality, and Metaphysical Illusions

Abstract: The talk will reassess Kit Fine’s seminal 1994 paper ‘Essence and Modality’, which constitutes a key moment in the development of contemporary metaphysics. Its reception (then and now) has been somewhat misleading, since the paper is much more cautious in its metaphysical claims than its reputation suggests: officially, its main aim is to distinguish ‘essence’ from ‘modality’ in concept rather than in real nature, though it does also contain more radical claims. The latter part of the talk will assess the more radical metaphysical themes associated with the paper, and argue that they result from a cognitive heuristic which can project pragmatic explanatory differences onto the mind-independent world. This will be illustrated in relation to the metaphysics of both sets and natural numbers.