Abaci’s “Kant’s Revolutionary Theory of Modality” reviewed by Dartmouth College
Uygar Abaci, Kant’s Revolutionary Theory of Modality, Oxford University Press, 2019, 287pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198831556.
Reviewed by Timothy Rosenkoetter, Dartmouth College
Spread out through Kant’s published writings and personal notes we find various ways in which modal concepts and properties are said to be extraordinary. In many of these passages Kant tells us that what sets possibility, existence, and necessity apart from non-modal properties is their relationality. How to cash this out is very much open to debate, but at least part of the idea seems to be that modal properties somehow involve the relation of subjects to objects. Substantial progress in reconstructing Kant’s modal theory has been made in recent years, due in no small part to Nick Stang’s Kant’s…