From April 29 to May 2, 2025, the Department of Philosophy hosted a workshop on the history of modal metaphysics. Scholars gathered to trace the evolution of modal thought from Aristotle to early modern philosophers.
The first session of the workshop was devoted to Aristotle’s so-called statistical theory of modality. We then turned to the medieval tradition, examining the views of William of Sherwood and Robert Kilwardby. The following session focused on John Duns Scotus’s groundbreaking account of modality, which is often credited with initiating a shift away from the statistical approach toward a model in which modal truths are grounded in divine faculties. The next four sessions explored the accounts of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, with particular attention to how each philosopher’s position relates to the tradition of grounding modality in divine faculties, as opposed to the more contemporary approach that appeals to intuitions about counterfactuals.
The workshop brought together faculty and graduate students from institutions including Princeton, Cambridge, Meiji University, and CUNY. It was organized by Alireza Fatollahi and featured contributions from a diverse group of international scholars.