Simona Aimar
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2020
Simona Aimar completed her doctoral studies at Oxford University and is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University College London. She has been a visiting scholar at NYU and the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, among other places. Her work focuses on Aristotle’s metaphysics of modality (notions like necessity and possibility), as well as on contemporary metaphysics and semantics. She also connects her work with issues in philosophy of mind and social philosophy.
We often now what has to be the case in the world for a claim to be true. For instance, we know that the claim
(1) It is raining in Princeton
is true just in case it is raining in Princeton. But there are a class of claim for which things are less straightforward: modal claims, such as necessity-claims and possibility-claims. In ordinary talk, we seem to have a good degree of confidence about whether claims like
(2) It is possibly raining in Princeton
(3) It is necessarily raining in Princeton
are true or false. But what has to be the case in the world, if anything, to make (2)-(3) true? This is an issue that is highly debated in the contemporary philosophical debate. Aimar’s research project asks this question to Aristotle and reconstructs the interesting answers he has to offer.