Kit Fine

Kit Fine (born 26 March 1946) is a British philosopher, currently university professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. Prior to joining the philosophy department of NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan and UCLA. The author of multiple books and over 100 articles in international academic journals, he has made notable contributions to the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language and also has written on ancient philosophy, in particular on Aristotle's account of logic and modality.

Kit Fine
Born	(1946-03-26) 26 March 1946 (age 79) England
Nationality	British
Spouse	Anne Fine (divorced)
Education
Education	B.A. 1967 (philosophy): University of Oxford Ph.D. 1969 (philosophy): University of Warwick
Doctoral advisor	A. N. Prior
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophical logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language
Notable ideas	Defense of modal actualism, ontological dependence, grounding and arbitrary objects Defence of semantic relationism[a] against semantic intrinsicalism[b][1]
Website	as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/kit-fine.html

He is also a distinguished research professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham, UK.^[2] Since 2018, Fine is visiting professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.^[3]

Education, family and career

After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford (B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics , 1967), Fine received his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in 1969, under the supervision of A. N. Prior. He then taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan, and UCLA, before moving to New York University as the Silver Professor and University Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics.

He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2005^[4] and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.^[5] He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and is a former editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.

Fine has two daughters from his former marriage to Anne Fine. Anne Fine is an author of children's books; Cordelia Fine is a professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne; Ione Fine is a professor at the University of Washington.^[6][7]

Philosophical work

The greatest value you can get from studying philosophy is learning how to think for yourself^[8]

In addition to his primary areas of research, he has written papers in ancient philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and economic theory.^[9]

Fine has described his general approach to philosophy as follows: "I’m firmly of the opinion that real progress in philosophy can only come from taking common sense seriously. A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made."^[10]

Awards

In 2013, Fine held the Gödel Lecture, titled Truthmaker semantics.^[11]

Bibliography

• Worlds, Times, and Selves (with A. N. Prior). University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. ISBN 0-87023-227-4
• Reasoning With Arbitrary Objects. Blackwell, 1986. ISBN 0-631-13844-7
• The Limits of Abstraction. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-924618-1
• Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-927871-7
• Semantic Relationism. Blackwell, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4051-0844-7
• Vagueness: A Global Approach, Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0-1975-1495-5

"For a full 2023 listing of publications see "Bibliography of Kit Fine", (back matter from Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic).^[12]

Notes

1. Semantic relationism is the thesis that the content of utterances is not entirely a matter of their intrinsic semantic features.
2. Semantic intrinsicalism is the thesis that the content of utterances is fully determined by semantic features intrinsic to them.