Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Necessity and Non-Existence' and 'Summa Contra Gentiles'

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4 ideas

10. Modality / A. Necessity / 8. Transcendental Necessity
15064 Proper necessary truths hold whatever the circumstances; transcendent truths regardless of circumstances [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: We distinguish between the necessary truths proper, those that hold whatever the circumstances, and the transcendent truths, those that hold regardless of the circumstances.
     From: Kit Fine (Necessity and Non-Existence [2005], Intro)
     A reaction: Fine's project seems to be dividing the necessities which derive from essence from the necessities which tended to be branded in essentialist discussions as 'trivial'.
10. Modality / C. Sources of Modality / 6. Necessity from Essence
15070 It is the nature of Socrates to be a man, so necessarily he is a man [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: It is of the nature of Socrates to be a man; and from this it appears to follow that necessarily he is a man.
     From: Kit Fine (Necessity and Non-Existence [2005], 04)
     A reaction: I'm always puzzled by this line of thought, because it is only the intrinsic nature of beings like Socrates which decides in the first place what a 'man' is. How can something help to create a category, and then necessarily belong to that category?
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 2. Nature of Possible Worlds / a. Nature of possible worlds
15069 Possible worlds may be more limited, to how things might actually turn out [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: An alternative conception of a possible world says it is constituted, not by the totality of facts, or of how things might be, but by the totality of circumstances, or how things might turn out.
     From: Kit Fine (Necessity and Non-Existence [2005], 02)
     A reaction: The general idea is to make a possible world more limited than in Idea 15068. It only contains properties arising from 'engagement with the world', and won't include timeless sentences. It is a bunch of possibilities, not of actualities?
15068 The actual world is a totality of facts, so we also think of possible worlds as totalities [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: We are accustomed think of the actual world as the totality of facts, and so we think of any possible world as being like the actual world in settling the truth-value of every single proposition.
     From: Kit Fine (Necessity and Non-Existence [2005], 02)
     A reaction: Hence it is normal to refer to a possible world as a 'maximal' set of of propositions (sentences, etc). See Idea 15069 for his proposed alternative view.