b. 1946
Kit Fine is a British-born philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important metaphysicians and logicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He has made groundbreaking contributions to modal logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mathematics, with particular influence on theories of essence, grounding, and ontological dependence.
Developed an influential essentialist theory distinguishing essence from mere necessity
Pioneering work on the logic of ground and ontological dependence
Major contributions to modal logic, including work on prior and postcriterion semantics
Influential critiques of modal realism and possible-worlds semantics
Significant work on the metaphysics of vagueness and arbitrary objects
By analogy, simply positing relational tropes does not provide an effective theoretical response to Bradley's argument
claimNo-trace actualists cannot provide a standard compositional semantics for modal languages.
claimThe apparent multiplication of word-tokens from a single inscription based on different readings is not a genuine mereological multiplication of entities