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.

As I promised, here is a lighter post, no philosophy at all! Well, no philosophy apart from one link.

Between La Barrillette and La Dôle

Firstly, I have edited my photos from a hike in the Jura Mountains just over a week ago and they are now available in my gallery. I’ll add a couple of photos to this post as well. The hike was organised by a French guy named Amaury whom I met at a philosophy seminar here and thought I knew from a conference or something, but it turned out that he’s in astrophysics rather than philosophy so we spent some time wondering about where we knew each other from. After a while it turned out that we were on a hiking trip to Skye some years ago with the St. Andrews Uni hill walking society — Amaury did a Masters there and I used to go there to see my girlfriend at the time. Anyway, it was quite a coincidence to meet in Geneva!

Apart from myself and Amaury, the group consisted of a Polish philosopher, Jacek, who just arrived to Geneva and will be visiting here for a year, my mate Pekka from Finland, who was visiting here just for the weekend, and an Icelandic girl, Milla, who is visiting her boyfriend in Geneva. We took the train to St. Cergue, to an altitude around 1000m, an hour away from Geneva, and walked up to La Barillette (1,525m) and La Dôle (1,677m) from there. As you can see, the day was quite beautiful, while Geneva was covered in thick fog. I love shooting cloud covered valleys and I was quite happy to get some photography done — I haven’t been shooting much recently. Same goes for hiking, I really needed it, and I hope to be able to go once more before I leave Geneva if at all possible.

We got a view of Mont Blanc!

On the topic of photography, I’ve been meaning to go for a shoot in Geneva, but the weather hasn’t been that great. On the few days that it has been good, I’ve been busy with other things, and it looks like I will be quite busy for the remainder of my stay. Hopefully I’ll be able to go for a shoot though, and to post the results in my gallery.

To get some more content here, I’ll post a few links:

I recently discovered this blog about beer, with news about exciting beers and some tasting notes.

This week I’ve been watching an amateur web series called The Guild about online gamers, which is quite funny. Check it out.

And finally, to get at least some philosophical content in, check out Peter Smith’s lecture notes on Gödel Without Tears, where he attempts to explain Gödel in an understandable fashion. I’ve wanted to get some sort of a philosophical understanding of incompleteness for a long time, so I’m guessing that this is my best bet!

That’s it for now, I’ll probably post something about my ‘Varieties of Modality’ talks soon, and perhaps more lighter stuff as well…

Just next to La Dôle summit