Given how many people glance over this site from time to time, I have to set myself a few rules for what I post. One of these is that I don’t post about what I’m told about un(web)published work people are doing. The reasons for this seem fairly obvious, and the sensible thing to do would be to not go close to violating this rule.

But I’m not always sensible. The other day I posted “a short post on Aristotle’s modal logic”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004205.html based on some ideas Kit Fine had mentioned the previous evening. I had thought that I was just posting things that were already widely known by the relevant experts, and was stopping short of posting on Kit’s original ideas. But it didn’t quite work out that way, and the discussion ended up being more about what Kit may have been working on than on what was public domain. So I ended up feeling/looking a little stupid. In future I won’t go quite as close to crossing that line, and I’m rather sorry that I did so in the first place.

The point of this is not (just) pointing out my mistakes but to note that Kit has very helpfully posted “his paper on Aristotle’s modal logic”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/fine/papers/aristotlemodalitydraft.pdf. There are many very interesting ideas there. In particular there’s a very clever proposal about how Aristotle might have understood embedded modal operators that explains why the odd-looking axiom L(MA -> MB) -> L(A -> B) would turn out to be valid. Many of the questions people had in that thread are expertly addressed by the paper. I don’t often get the chance to recommend papers in ancient philosophy here, so I’m pleased to have this chance to recommend one!