Introduction

This introductory chapter gives a general survey of the research context, along with brief descriptions of the chapters collected here, indicating how they contribute to the three-year project which provided that context. Focusing on absolute notions of necessity and possibility, the project's principal aims were to explore the most fundamental questions and issues centred on them - ranging from scepticism about modal notions themselves, anti-realist view such as non-cognitivism, and the tenability of any sort of realism about modal facts, through to questions about the metaphysics, logic, and epistemology of modality which any broadly realist view must answer.