I provide an account of de re necessity conceived as a predicate applying to formulae and variable assignments. I demonstrate that operator and alternative predicate approaches fall short of capturing the full expressive power of de re necessity. A possible worlds semantics will be given for the necessity predicate building on previous work by Halbach, Leitgeb and Welch (2003). I will then look at themes from modal metaphysics such as necessitism vs contingentism and ante rem versus in rebus conceptions of universals, recanting some claims in (Halbach and Sturm, 2004).
References:
Halbach, Volker, Hannes Leitgeb and Philip Welch (2003), ‘Possible Worlds Semantics For Modal Notions Conceived As Predicates’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 32, 179–223.
Halbach, Volker and Holger Sturm (2004), ‘Bealers Masterargument: Ein Lehrstu¨ck zum Verha¨ltnis von Metaphysik und Semantik’, Facta Philosophica 6, 97–110.
See the seminar webpage http://users.ox.ac.uk/~philmath/pomseminar.html for titles and abstracts of other speakers as available.
Philosophy of Mathematics Seminar Convenors: Daniel Isaacson and Volker Halbach
