Essence and Existence

Bob Hale (1945-2017) taught at the universities of Lancaster, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Sheffield. His main research interests were in the foundations of mathematics, philosophy of logic and language, and metaphysics. From 1997 to 1999 he was a British Academy Research Reader, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2002-3 he was President of the Aristotelian Society, and from 2009 to 2011 was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. He is author of Abstract Objects (Blackwell 1987) and Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (Oxford 2013); and co-author of The Reason's Proper Study (Oxford 2001, with Crispin Wright).Jessica Leech was jointly awarded her doctorate from the University of Sheffield and the University of Geneva in 2011. She was a Junior Research Fellow at King's College Cambridge from 2011-12, then lectured philosophy at the University of Sheffield from 2012, before moving to lecture philosophy at King's College London from 2016. Her main research interests are primarily on issues to do with possibility and necessity, both in contemporary metaphysics and philosophical logic, and in Kant's work. She is co-editor of Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (Oxford 2018, with Ivette Fred-Rivera).

Full of interesting and often promising ideas.

• Introduction (Kit Fine) 1: Essence and Definition by Abstraction 2: Essence and Existence 3: The Problem of De Re Modality 4: Ontology Deflated 5: Ontological Categories and the Problem of Expressibility (with Øystein Linnebo) 6: What Makes True Universal Statements True? 7: Exact Truthmakers, Modality, and Essence 8: S5 as the Logic of Metaphysical Modality: Two Arguments for and Two Arguments Against 9: Relative Necessity Reformulated (with Jessica Leech) 10: Definition, Abstraction, Postulation, and Magic 11: Second-order Logic: Properties, Semantics, and Existential Commitments 12: The Problem of Mathematical Objects 13: Properties, Predication, and Arbitrary Sets 14: Ordinals by Abstraction 15: Bolzano> 's Definition of Analytic Propositions (with Crispin Wright) Bibliography of the writings of Bob Hale