Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

“The Craft of Formal Logic” is Arthur Prior’s unpublished textbook, written in 1950–51, in which he developed a theory of modality as quantification over possible worlds-like objects. This theory predates most of the prominent pioneering texts in possible worlds semantics and anticipates the significance of its basic concept in modal logic. Prior explicitly defines modal operators as quantifiers of ‘entities’ with modal character. Although he talks about these ‘entities’ only informally, and hesitates how to name them, using alternately the phrases (...) ‘possible states of affairs’, ‘chances’, ‘cases’ or ‘peculiar objects’, he is nevertheless very clear that they should be the fundamental concept of any theory of modality as a form of quantity. Without the assumption that modal operators quantify over such modal objects, the modal system will be incapable of distinguishing an actually true proposition from a necessarily true one. Due to the fact that Prior never made any direct reference to this theory in his subsequently published papers, it remained largely unknown. The comparison of “The Craft” with some of his papers on tense logic suggests that this early theory of modality underlies his later work on temporality. (shrink)