Introduction

Abstract

Over the last forty-odd years, Kit Fine has been one of the most influential and original analytic philosophers. He has made provocative and innovative contributions to several areas of systematic philosophy, including philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as a number of topics in philosophical logic, such as modal logic, relevance logic, the logic of essence, and the logic of vagueness. These contributions have helped reshape the agendas of those fields and have given fresh impetus to a number of perennial debates. Fine’s work is distinguished by its great technical sophistication, philosophical breadth, and independence from current orthodoxy. A blend of philosophically sound common sense combined with a virtuosity of philosophical argumentation and construction, meant to back up the former, this seems to me to be the nature of Kit Fine’s lasting contributions to the current trends in analytic philosophy. The chapter gives a general overview of the groundbreaking work of Kit Fine and connects the contributed essays with Kit Fine’s work.