Modality : a history

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"Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities such as necessity and possibility. In particular, the concepts of necessity and 'wha...

"Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities such as necessity and possibility. In particular, the concepts of necessity and 'what must be' played an important role in Pre-Socratic thought. For example, Anaximander maintained that things perish into that from which they came to be 'in accordance with what must be' (kata to chreôn). Heraclitus held that 'everything comes about in accordance with strife and what must be (kat' erin kai chreôn)'. In his poem, Parmenides asserts that what is (to eon) is entirely still and changeless because 'powerful Necessity (Anagkê) holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all around'. Among the atomists, Democritus identified necessity with a whirl of atoms, holding that 'everything comes about in accordance with necessity, inasmuch as the whirl - which he calls necessity - is the cause of the coming about of all things'. Finally, Plato in the Timaeus describes the creation of the cosmos as the result of the interplay between divine demiurgic Intelligence and natural Necessity. While necessity figures centrally in the cosmologies presented by Plato and the Pre-Socratics, we do not have any evidence that these thinkers provided an account of the nature of necessity in general. The first philosopher known to have provided such an account is Aristotle. In his logical and metaphysical works, Aristotle develops a systematic theory of necessity and related modalities such as possibility and impossibility"--

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