- Enseignant-e: Christian Wuthrich
Course website: https://wuthrich.net/teaching/_MA_2026_ModalFrontier.html
Welcome to this MA seminar co-taught by Marcel Weber and Christian Wüthrich.
There will be no seminar on 16 September 2026. We will start the seminar on 23 September. In preparation for this meeting, please read the first text by Williamson.
Much of classic empiricist philosophy of science in the 20th century has been skeptical about modal claims, i.e., claims about possible or necessary states of affairs. While laws of nature were always conceived as carrying some kind of necessity, this necessity was traditionally spelled out in epistemic rather than in metaphysical terms. Examples include Goodman's notion of projectability or Hempel's criterion of counterfactual-supporting force. Modal realists such as Lewis, on the other hand, were criticized for being out of touch with scientific practice. In recent decades, modalities have made a comeback in philosophy of science. Some scientific theories and models, on contemporary views, represent possible entities such as supersymmetric particles or possible life forms such as mirror life. Idealized models and thought experiments may reveal objective possibilities and necessities. Counterfactual conditionals such as "if atmospheric greenhouse gases were at pre-industrial levels, the average global temperature would be about 1.4° less" are thought to have a mind-independent truth value, and so on. In this seminar we will discuss some key texts in which we can see this modal turn in philosophy of science unfold.