This introduction offers a theoretical model for reading the relation between the conditions that determine the possibility of literary expression, and those possibilities that literature itself invents. It is in the relation between these two forms of possibility, the introduction argues, that the politics of literary form resides.

The last two decades of critical thinking have seen a quite radical shift in our understanding of this relationship. The introduction traces these shifts, and places the essays collected in this volume (written over that two decade period) in the context of such theoretical and political transformations. The passage of literary thinking in the current century, the introduction argues, requires a new critical understanding of literary possibility, which it is the task of these essays to perform.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to the conception of propositions as pictures in the Tractatus. In this conception, modality is not the subject matter of theorizing but an ineluctable aspect of picturing of reality whose showing forth Wittgenstein aims to help us see by operationalizing the construction of propositions.

This chapter addresses the key question that should guide all social research, namely, what is it for? It argues that all research serves human interests, whether technocratic, hermeneutic, or emancipatory. Traditionally, technocratic research interests have been dominant. But, this chapter argues, a pragmatist approach to methodology foregrounds emancipatory research – which enables people to increase the domains of possibility within their lives.

Kierkegaard’s aesthete, named only as A, continually laments the lack of meaning in his life. He suffers through passions that flare up and quickly die away, leaving him in a melancholic state. His mode of being is on display in the Diapsalmata, the fragmentary writings at the start of Either/Or. In this chapter, we examine why he avoids becoming consistently engaged in the world and remains trapped within his alienated melancholia. We offer a general account of melancholy, arguing that melancholia is an existential condition that must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of possibility. We also provide a sympathetic interpretation of A’s melancholy, rather than placing blame upon him, because melancholia attunes us to certain aspects of the world and of human existence. The aesthetic life has epistemic, moral, and aesthetic worth on its own terms, so a person may legitimately decide to remain melancholic. This avoids compromising our possibilities, makes us receptive to the suffering of others, and may inspire creative activity such as writing poetical fragments.

After unpacking the sense in which Heidegger uses the term "contradiction," the chapter reviews his use of it in the strictly logical, “injunctive” sense as the “principle of non-contradiction” (PNC) and “law of thinking,” particularly as he wields it in the course of exposing what otherwise appear to be cases of vagueness or ambiguity. It then reviews his tendency in some contexts to align the PNC with a metaphysics that restricts being to being on hand (vorhanden) and the dilemma that this ontological interpretation presents, given his apparent adherence to the principle, even as he proposes a broader understanding of being. The chapter then suggests that his analysis of attunement in the 1929/30 lectures introduces a more expansive reading of the PNC and that this reading is corroborated by his existential interpretation of the principle in the Winter Semester of 1933/34. The interpretation is a ringing endorsement of the PNC and the sameness of reference it enjoins as a condition for being-with-one-another. The chapter concludes by probing the implications of this ontologically broader – or post-ontological – interpretation of the PNC for thinking and speaking of being itself, riddled with “nothingness” as it is.

The Sickness unto Death is one of a few pseudonymous texts designated “psychological” by Kierkegaard: taking this designation seriously, the chapter examines what The Sickness unto Death can contribute to our understanding of moods. A promising approach taken by recent philosophical analyses of depression has focused on the concept of possibility, and has argued that possibilities are typically a feature of the world as experienced by human beings, but that a depressed person feels that possibilities are severely impoverished or utterly absent. Manic and hypomanic states tend toward the opposite extreme, of an overabundance of possibility. This chapter draws upon the resources of existential thought in order to develop an understanding of cyclothymic spectrum conditions, demonstrating how Kierkegaard’s work provides resources for a non-reductive phenomenological psychology of moods.

Chapters 11 is about modality in Q’eqchi’-Maya – various resources speakers have for referring to entities and events that are nonactual, and hence notions like possibility, permission, necessity, and obligation. It focuses on the forms naru and tento, which are similar in function to the modal auxiliary verbs in English: naru doing work akin to English ‘may’ and ‘can’ (or deontic, dynamic, and circumstantial possibility), and tento doing work akin to English ‘must’. It offers a detailed examination of how speakers use such forms to represent and regiment what counts as obligatory, forbidden, permissible, and possible courses of action.

This essay examines Duns Scotus’s celebrated modal argument for the existence of a first cause in the light of his most extensive discussion of modality: namely, the account of the senses of ‘potency’ in his questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book IX, qq. 1–2. The author holds that it is possible to give two alternative reconstructions of Duns Scotus’s argument for the existence of a first cause depending on which of two alternative interpretations is given to the term ‘potency’. First, ‘potency’ can be taken as what is metaphysically possible. In this interpretation, the potential is co-extensive with ‘being’. Second, ‘potency’ can be taken to mean what is opposed to the actual. In this second interpretation, being in potency is a kind of non-being. The conclusion is that, contrary to what might first appear, it is the second interpretation of ‘potency’ that should be preferred if we want Duns Scotus’s argument for the existence of a first cause to work.

In the ongoing irresolution between religion and the secular, this chapter looks at the notion of the sacred as something always and already resolved to its counterpart, the profane. In defining the sacred as the opening of the world to its own outside, the chapter explores the reaches of this opening in relation to David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy. Across Jasper’s texts the sacred opens us to a mystical possibility embodied in spaces both real and imagined – such as desert, body or community – where the ascetic and the aesthetic come together. The chapter shows how this embodiment inhabits or dwells within a liturgical space by looking at liturgy’s “ergon” as cultural and communal poesis, which takes both individual and community to their own outside. This “ergon” is thus also a movement, a traversing with reverent care and a respectful silence towards “the impossible possibility of absolute vision” (Jasper). That vision enfolds together literature, art, religion, philosophy and sacrament in order to make possible within our world an impossibility that opens up our world, an opening that is both discovery and loss, both voice and silence, both all and nothing.

Maimonides’ definition of prophecy is a sophisticated hybrid engineered from the materials of Jewish theology and medieval Arabic philosophy. This essay opens with a brief exploration of the theology, epistemology and cognitive psychology shaping PM, which, together, informs Maimonides’ view that prophecy is a cognitive feat that will naturally be experienced by certain people as a dream or vision. The remainder of the essay seeks to determine the precise point in which Maimonides’ prophet formed the propositional attitude of central importance to epistemologists, namely belief. In so doing, it shall become apparent that in no way can the epistemology of prophecy be reduced to the epistemology of divine testimony, which demonstrates that prophecy, at least in Maimonides’ hands, is fallible and that the distinction between Mosaic and non-Mosaic prophecy is problematic.

Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e. the claim that the imaginability of a given scenario entails that such a scenario is in some sense possible. Relying on this kind of principle, philosophers have used imagination to justify theories in domains such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics.

It is commonly held in many philosophy of quantum gravity circles that endorsing Lewis ontology of modal realism is incompatible with endorsing the fundamental physical ontology of any quantum gravity theory. The unsolvable tension would be between the Lewis metaphysical commitment to the fundamentality of space and time and the physical lesson of quantum gravity about the disappearance of space and time from the fundamental structure of the world. In this essay I argue against the idea that the tension is unsolvable. This analysis does not apply to quantum gravity in genera, but only to quantum string theory.

The chapter argues that ELF users do not create new modal expressions; they rely on the rich repertoire that the English language offers to them. But those English modal expressions do not necessarily reflect the mindset of ELF users with different L1s. Rather they reflect the mindset of native speakers of English. So an attempt is made to explain the interplay of these two factors in the use of modal expressions by ELF interlocutors. It is argued that modal use in ELF is motivated by three important factors: language learning experience, effect of L1 and immediate communicative needs.