Aristotle, On Interpretation - Necessity, Contingency, and Future Propositions - Sadler's Lectures

This lecture discusses the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle' work, On Interpretation, focusing on his discussion of what have come to be called "modalities" such as necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility, with the truth values of future seemingly contingent propositions in mind, for example that a sea-battle will or will not take place tomorrow. One possible approach is to say that since propositions must be either true or false, future propositions already are true or false of necessity and that we simply don't know their truth or falsity. Another is to say that it is necessary for them to be either true or false, but that neither of these truth values are necessary to contingent propositions referring to future events that have not yet happened. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - You can find over 4,000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - Purchase Aristotle's On Interpretation - amzn.to/3nS55ud

You can listen to Aristotle, On Interpretation - Necessity, Contingency, and Future Propositions - Sadler's Lectures online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Aristotle, On Interpretation - Necessity, Contingency, and Future Propositions - Sadler's Lectures is an episode from Sadler's Lectures by Gregory B. Sadler.

This episode is 00:14:02 long.

This episode was published on May 6, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Sadler's Lectures when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.