The Metaphysics of Modality



Though it didn't fall deadborn from the press, my first book, The Metaphysics of Modality, went out of print in the 1990's. But there's still some demand for it, as prices on Amazon indicate. I have seen a reseller on amazon.uk offer "new" copies at over £800! At any rate, in 1998 I scanned a copy into my computer, Apple having mysteriously omitted to provide a conversion tool for documents written in 1983 in the built-in world-processor on Eagle II machines running CP/M. I laid out the text anew, and started writing appendices to various chapters. But this writing project didn't get very far, and I put it on hold fairly quickly. I may eventually return to it, but some colleagues suggested to me that the text of the original book would be worth posting by itself. Clicking the cover-image above will bring it up. There are some fixes, but it's essentially as published in 1985.

A couple of minor points. First, the book's page layout is intended for duplex printing on US letter (8.5"x11"); if you simply scroll through it, the main text column will move from side to side on the screen in a possibly disconcerting way, because of the difference in format for left and right physical pages. If you print on A4, make sure Acrobat's "shrink to printable area" scaling option is set. If you make a printout and bind the pages in some way, odd-numbered pages should be on the right. Second, although the hyperlinks seem to be working, those in the index can be tricky to click. I find that to jump to the page I want in an index entry with more than one linked page, I have to click close to the comma separating the desired page number from the previous one.



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