On Necessary Individuals and Ways (sic!) for Them to Be: Celebrating 10-Year Anniversary of Modal Logic as Metaphysics

Abstract

Timothy Williamson, the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, is one of the leading figures in the contemporary analytic philosophy. His areas of research include philosophy of language, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. Professor Williamson has authored over two hundred articles and numerous books, including such modern classics as Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell 2007, 2nd updated ed. 2021), and Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford, 2013). I had the pleasure to meet Professor Williamson at The 26th Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference, and he kindly agreed to give an interview on matters of modality. The enjoyable and fruitful a few hourtalk that we had, which appears below slightly abridged, revolved around the history of modal logics, Saul Kripke and his works, the controversy between necessitists and contingentists, higher-order logics and metaphysics, and the influence of Modal Logic as Metaphysics. The interview was taken on a rainy afternoon on Monday, the 14th of November 2022, at New College, Oxford.