Modality and Anti-Metaphysics critically examines the most prominent approaches to modality among analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, including essentialism. Defending both the project of metaphysics and the essentialist position that metaphysical modality is conceptually and ontologically primitive, Stephen McLeod argues that the logical positivists did not succeed in banishing metaphysical modality from their own theoretical apparatus and he offers an original defence of metaphysics against their advocacy of its elimination. -/- Seeking to assuage the sceptical worries which underlie modal (...) anti-realism, McLeod provides an original contribution to essentialist epistemology, engaging with current debates about modality and suggesting that standard essentialist approaches to some issues in the philosophies of logic and language require revision. -/- This book offers valuable insights to professional philosophers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in metaphysics, philosophy of logic or the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The Reduction of the Possible to the Real. Modern philosophy cannot avoid dealing with possible worlds - neither in the field of intensional logic nor in other fields not directly connected with logical investigations. This paper attempts to develop a method to substitute possible worlds by the real world, referring to the works of Stig Kanger and Nino B. Cocchiarella. This is done by investigating the metaphorical and dynamical functions of natural languages. It is proved that this new technique is (...) adequate for use in the semantics of intensional languages. As an example a language is constructed, which is based on the aristotelian view of universal concepts. (shrink)