Abstract
In his Commentary to Aristotle’s De interpretatione Boethius says that ‘Diodorus possibile esse determinat, quod verum aut est aut erit’.1 Diodorus’s view was well known and much debated in Antiquity. Modern writers often refer to it as his ‘definition’ of the concept of possibility.
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Notes
Boethius, Commentarii in Librum Aristotelis Περι ‘Eρμηνειας, C. Meiser (ed.): 1877, ed. secunda, Leipzig, p. 234.
The literature dealing with this fascinating topic is vast and has grown rapidly in recent decades. My own modest contribution to it is a paper ‘The “Master Argument” of Diodorus’, in E. Saarinen et al. (eds.), Essays in Honour of Jaakko Hintikka, D. Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1979, pp. 297-308.
I do not know the history of this term. Hintikka uses it in the same, or a closely similar, sense to the one in which I use it here. The earliest occurrence of the term known to me is with Oskar Becker in his book Untersuchungen über den Modalkalkül (Meisenheim/Glan 1952). Becker, however, does not mean by it a reductionist notion of modality. By the statistical interpretation of modality he means the view that possibility means truth in some possible world, necessity truth in all possible worlds, and impossibility truth (falsehood) in no (all) possible world(s).
Ibid.
Cf. my paper’ some Observations on Modal Logic and Philosophical Systems’, in R. E. Olson and A.M. Paul (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1972.
By Arthur O. Lovejoy in his classic study of the role of this idea in the history of thought, The Great Chain of Being, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1936. See pp. 52, 337f. (Harper Torchbook edition).
Op. cit., pp. 55f. and 338.
See Jaakko Hintikka, Time and Necessity: Studies in Aristotle’s Theory of Modality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973; and Jaakko Hintikka in collaboration with Unto Remes and Simo Knuuttila, Aristotle on Modality and Determinism (Acta Philosophica Fennica 29, no. 1), North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977.
Alexander Aphrodisias, Commentarium in Aristotelis Analyt. Prior. Librum I, in M. Wallies (ed.), Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca II 1, G. Reimer, Berlin, 1883.
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Von Wright, G.H. (1991). Possibility, Plenitude and Determinism (With Some Comments on Ancient Authors). In: Lewis, H.A. (eds) Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Synthese Library, vol 213. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_7
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