Modality is important to philosophy for many reasons. A first reason derives from philosophy's traditional association with logic. Advances in modal logic in the middle of the twentieth century provided a reason to be interested in the modalities. Moreover, propositions that are logically true seem necessarily true. Another source of modality's importance is that necessary truth, according to one tradition, demarcates philosophical from empirical inquiry. Science identifies contingent aspects of the world, whereas philosophical inquiry reveals the essential nature of its objects; philosophical propositions are therefore necessarily true when true at all.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 150 citations exist upstream.