Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality

Perhaps no one has done more in the last 30 years to advance thinking in the metaphysics of modality than has Alvin Plantinga. Collected here are some of his most important essays on this influential subject. Dating back from the late 1960's to the present, they chronicle the development of Plantinga's thoughts about some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics: what is the nature of abstract objects like possible worlds, properties, propositions, and such phenomena? Are there possible but non-actual objects? Can objects that do not exist exemplify properties? Plantinga gives thorough and penetrating answers to all of these questions and many others.

This volume contains some of the best work in metaphysics from the past 30 years, and will remain a source of critical contention and keen interest among philosophers of metaphysics and philosophical logic for years to come.

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of Warranted Christian Belief (OUP 2000), Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function (both OUP 1993), and The Nature of Necessity (OUP 1979).