Does Time precede Modality?

Abstract

The titular question can be interpreted as follows: Does future possibility precede logical possibility ─ which provides simultaneous alternatives? In this paper, I defend a philosophical intuition that future possibility is more fundamental than logical possibility, even though the former seems conceptually more complex than the latter. My attempt can be regarded as retreating from Duns Scotusʼs modal semantics to Aristotleʼs (cf. Yagi 2009, Knuuttila 2013). Moreover, I attempt to reconstruct my previous arguments (Aoyama 2008, 2011) on the assumption that the above intuition is correct, and seek to connect Kripkeʼs famous argument about de re modality (Kripke 1980) with Wittgensteinʼs argument on certainty regarding de re beliefs (Wittgenstein 1969). In the appendix, I note that the background of this paper is related to Nietzscheʼs peculiar fatalism (I call a world in which this kind of fatalism is true not an ʻunfree worldʼ but an ʻafree worldʼ; everything in such a world involves no contrast between being free and being unfree that can be found in the determiningdetermined relation).