Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, Verso, 2011, 304 pages

The fallacy of communism.

Chance and Actuality

The relation between chance and actuality gives rise to the following puzzle. On the one hand, it may be a chancy matter what will actually happen. On the other hand, standard semantics for ‘actually’ imply that sentences beginning with ‘actually’ are never contingent. In order to elucidate this puzzle, a kind of objective semantic indeterminacy will be defended: in a chancy world, it may be a ...

Absolute Actuality and the Plurality of Worlds

Let’s fix some terminology at the start. A world (or possible world – for me, the ‘possible’ is redundant) is, first, an individual, not a set or class; second, a particular, not a property or universal; third, concrete in this sense: it is fully determinate in all qualitative respects; and, fourth, a maximal interrelated whole: each world is internally unified, and isolated from every other wo...

Actuality Entailments *

The term ‘actuality entailment’ was coined by Rajesh Bhatt in his 1999 dissertation to describe the implicative inference that arises when ability modals combine with perfective aspect. This article investigates the nature of this inference and the contributions of aspect and modality, by surveying the environments in which it is found. Prior to Bhatt’s dissertation, the literatures on aspect a...

Modal Meinongianism and Actuality

Modal Meinongianism is the most recent neo-Meinongian theory. Its main innovation consists in a Comprehension Principle which, unlike other neo-Meinongian approaches, seemingly avoids limitations on the properties that can characterize objects. However, in a recent paper A. Sauchelli has raised an objection against modal Meinongianism, to the effect that properties and relations involving refer...