Being Necessary

Ivette Fred-Rivera was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, studied in public schools where she discovered Plato's dialogues during high school, and did her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She did her PhD in the Department of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. As a postgraduate, Ivette visited the Department of Logic and Metaphysics of the University of St Andrews, Scotland, to work with Professors Bob Hale and Crispin Wright on the problem of a priori knowledge. She has taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras since 1998. Her research areas are epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic, and she also has published works on aesthetics and art. Jessica Leech first studied philosophy at King's College, Cambridge and took her masters degree at King's College London. She did her doctorate jointly at the University of Sheffield and the University of Geneva (as part of the 'Theory of Essence' research project based at the Eidos Centre for Metaphysics at the University of Geneva) and was supervised by Fabrice Correia and Bob Hale. Jessica's first post-doctoral position was a Junior Research Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. She then took up a lectureship in philosophy at the University of Sheffield before joining KCL's philosophy department in September 2016. Her research focuses primarily on issues to do with possibility and necessity, both in contemporary debates, and in Kant's work.