Essays on Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality: Introduction

This focus of Philosophical Inquiries is devoted to Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (Oxford University Press, 2015). In her book, Vetter offers an account of (certain) modalities in terms of the dispositions of certain entities; examples of these dispositions are a glass’ fragility, or a rubber band’s elasticity. More specifically, Vetter’s account aims to explain metaphysical possibility and necessity in terms of a generalized notion of dispositionality. She refers to such notion as potentiality.