3 - The Modal Metaphysics of Alvin Plantinga

Summary

PLANTINGA'S MODAL METAPHYSICS IN (RECENT) HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that is concerned with the extent and content of reality: with what there is and with the nature of what there is. Matters of modality are matters of possibilities, impossibilities and necessities: what can (could, might) be, what cannot (could not, must not) be and what cannot (could not, must not) be otherwise. The salient questions of the metaphysics of modality, then, are these: whether there is a modal reality – whether there is a part of reality in which modal facts consist (or which makes modal propositions true); whether such a modal consists in irreducibly modal facts or in nonmodal facts; whether modal facts consist (partly) in the existence of objects or properties of a special kind and – if so – what the nature and extent of such things is.

Perhaps these questions give a rather contemporary twist to the characterization of the metaphysics of modality; perhaps our predecessors would not have articulated their concern with the nature of modality in quite this way. But that such a concern is identifiable at many important periods in the history of Western philosophy is not seriously in doubt. It is hardly arguable that Aristotle was a practitioner of modal metaphysics nor that, as a result of Aristotle's influence, such concerns figure prominently in medieval philosophy.