Reforging the Great Chain of Being

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Gaps in the Great Chain of Being: An Exercise in the Methodology of the History of Ideas

   • Jaakko Hintikka

   Pages 1-17

3. Empty Forms in Plato

   • Michael David Rohr

   Pages 19-56

4. Aristotle on the Realization of Possibilities in Time

   • Jaakko Hintikka

   Pages 57-72

5. Aristotle and the Priority of Actuality

   • R. M. Dancy

   Pages 73-115

6. Anselm’s Modal Conceptions

   • Eileen F. Serene

   Pages 117-162

7. Time and Modality in Scholasticism

   • Simo Knuuttila

   Pages 163-257

8. Leibniz on Plenitude, Relations, and the ‘Reign of Law’

   • Jaakko Hintikka

   Pages 259-286

9. Kant on ‘The Great Chain of Being’ or the Eventual Realization of All Possibilities: A Comparative Study

   • Jaakko Hintikka, Heikki Kannisto

   Pages 287-308

10. Back Matter

    Pages 309-321

    PDF

A sports reporter might say that in a competition all the participants realize their potentialities or possibilities. When an athlete performs far below his usual standard, it can be said that it was possible for him to do better. But the idea of fair play requires that this use of 'possible' refers to another com­ petition. It is presumed that the best athlete wins and that no real possibility of doing better is left unrealized in a competition. Here we have a use of language, a language game, in which modal notions are used so as to imply that if something is possible, it is realized. This idea does not belong to the general presuppositions of current ordinary usage. It is, nevertheless, not difficult to fmd other similar examples outside of the language of sports. It may be that such a use of modal notions is sometimes calculated to express that in the context in question there are no real alternative courses of events in contradistinction to other cases in which some possible alternatives remain unrealized. Even though modal notions are currently interpreted without the presup­ position that each genuine possibility should be realized at some moment of the actual history, there are contemporary philosophical models of modalities which incorporate this presupposition. In his book Untersuchungen tiber den Modalkalkiil (Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1952, pp. 16-36), Oscar Becker presents a statistical interpretation of modal calculi.

• Aristotle
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Immanuel Kant
• Plato
• Scholasticism
• concept
• history
• history of literature
• idea
• interpret
• language
• model
• sports
• subject
• time

• Dept. of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

  Simo Knuuttila

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