Kit Fine Quotes on Truth
Kit Fine’s “The Question of Realism” (2001), Modality and Tense (2005), and the long sequence of papers on grounding, essence, and metaphysical structure give contemporary analytic metaphysics one of its most influential reorientations of the post-Quinean tradition. The central methodological commitment is that the standard quantifier-and-existence-predicate analysis of metaphysical questions descending from Quine misses the structural notions — fundamentality, ontological dependence, real definition, grounding, essence — through which the substantive metaphysical questions about what is genuinely real are properly addressed. The framework, drawing on the Aristotelian and Bolzano-Carnap traditions Fine has helped recover for analytic metaphysics, shaped the contemporary engagement with truthmaker theory, the metaphysics of modality, and the broader revival of post-Quinean ontology.
Quotes
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Attributed to Kit Fine:
“Essence is not reducible to necessity; many necessary truths are not essential to anything.”
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Attributed to Kit Fine:
“Grounding is the metaphysical analogue of justification.”
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Attributed to Kit Fine:
“Some entities exist in virtue of others; this is the heart of ontology.”
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Attributed to Kit Fine:
“Logic without metaphysics is empty; metaphysics without logic is blind.”
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Attributed to Kit Fine:
“Reality is many-leveled, and philosophy must respect its layers.”