Necessary Beings

Bob Hale has taught at the University of Lancaster, University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow, and University of Sheffield. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, and his main research interests are in the foundations of mathematics, and philosophy of logic and language. From 1997 to 1999 he was a British Academy Research Reader, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2002-3 he was President of Aristotelian Society, and from 2009 to 2011 was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. He is a member of the editorial board of Philosophia Mathematica, and is author of Abstract Objects (Blackwell, 1987), co-editor of Reading Putnam (with Peter Clark; Blackwell, 1994), the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Language (with Crispin Wright; Blackwell 1997), and Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (with Aviv Hoffmann; OUP, 2010); and co-author of The Reason's Proper Study (with Crispin Wright; OUP, 2001).

• Preface and acknowledgements ; Introduction ; 1. Ontological preliminaries ; 2. The necessity of necessity ; 3. Irreducible modality ; 4. Absolute Modality ; 5. The Source of Logical Necessities ; 6. Metaphysical Necessities ; 7. Necessary beings: properties and numbers ; 8. Higher-order logics ; 9. Contingent beings ; 10. Possibilities ; 11. Essential knowledge ; Bibliography ; Index

Bob Hale's distinguished record of research places him among the most important and influential contemporary analytic metaphysicians. In his deep, wide-ranging, yet highly readable book Necessary Beings, Hale draws upon, but substantially integrates and extends, a good deal of his past research to produce a sustained and richly textured essay on - as promised in the subtitle - ontology, modality, and the relations between them. Christopher Menzel, Philosophia Mathematica [T]he essentialist theory presented in this book constitutes a significant contribution to an exciting research project concerning the relations between modality and essence. In addition, of course, Hale's development of the essentialist theory is only one aspect of the book's important contribution to central and fundamental topics concerning the nature of modality. Penelope Mackie, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews It is very a thorough book and Hale covers a lot of ground. It contains not only new research but also useful summaries of Hales views and overviews of the various positions he opposes or develops. Thus it is not only of interest to experts in the field, but it can also serve as an introduction to the topic to readers with a general knowledge of logic and metaphysics.