NDPR Scott Soames The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy Volume 3: The Struggle for Modality

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.12.1 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Scott Soames, The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy Volume 3: The Struggle for Modality, Princeton University Press, 2025, 352pp., $65.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780691160047.

Reviewed by Fraser MacBride, University of Manchester

It was a struggle, but commonsense won out. That’s not my verdict on Scott Soames’ The Struggle for Modality.[1] That’s his verdict on the development of analytic philosophy vis-à-vis our understanding of modality—a developmental arc described by Soames which culminates in our community embrace of metaphysical modality, specifically the distinction of essence and accident in re. We began benighted because we made a crippling identification of necessity with analyticity and because we lacked a developed modal logic—the lack being partly a consequence of the crippling identification already made. Modal logic didn’t come of age until Kripke published his model-theoretic semantics...