A discussion of Aristotle’s thought on determinism and culpability, Necessity, Cause, and Blame also reveals Richard Sorabji’s own philosophical commitments. He makes the original argument here that Aristotle separates the notions of necessity and cause, rejecting both the idea that all events are necessarily determined as well as the idea that a non-necessitated event must also be non-caused. In support of this argument, Sorabji engages in a wide-ranging discussion of explanation, time, free will, essence, and purpose in nature. (...) He also provides historical perspective, arguing that these problems remain intimately bound up with modern controversies. “ Necessity, Cause and Blame would be counted by all as one of Sorabji’s finest. The book is essential for philosophers—both specialists on the Greeks and modern thinkers about free will—and also compelling for non-specialists.”—Martha Nussbaum “Original and important . . . The book relates Aristotle’s discussions to both the contemporary debates on determinism and causation and the ancient ones. It is especially detailed on Stoic arguments about necessity . . . and on the social and legal background to Aristotle’s thought.”— Choice “It is difficult to convey the extraordinary richness of this book. . . . A Greekless philosopher could read it with pleasure . . . At the same time, its learning and scholarship are enormous.”—G. E. M. Anscombe, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Many people hold that there is a distinctive notion of metaphysical necessity. In this paper I explain why I am skeptical about the view. I examine the sorts of considerations that are adduced for it, and argue that they meet equal and opposite considerations.

Natural necessity is the kind of necessity that is supplied by ‘nature’: e.g., necessarily, a glass is broken when it is pressed with a certain force. Relevant topics of natural necessity include c...

The aim of this chapter is to explore to some extent the relationship between identity and necessity in logic and metaphysics. First, I provide a historically-based summary of proofs of the necessity of identity, highlighting the importance of the role that self-identity plays. Second, I introduce two examples of metaphysical topics where the necessity of identity has played a pivotal role: the necessary a posteriori, and the coincidence of material objects. I argue that important aspects of these (...) debates rest on how we represent identity. Third, I consider some recent work on generalized identity. This opens up new prospects for explaining why identity is necessary. (shrink)

The principle of necessity as applied to self-defence requires the use of the least harmful defensively effective means of thwarting a wrongful threat. Yet –so I argue – a harm can be excessive even when it is the least harmful way of dealing with the threat at the time of the attack. I therefore propose a historical view of the requirement of necessity. Historical necessity requires the selection of the least harmful means to thwart a future attack (...) at the point in time at which we have a solid presumption that the future attack will take place. This may happen considerably before the time of the attack. Once you fail to acquire or preserve the least harmful defensive option for thwarting a future attack you may come to be irrevocably in breach of necessity. The paper tackles a number of objections to the view proposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We (...) also argue that the Necessity of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations. (shrink)

Following Smiley’s influential proposal, it has become standard practice to characterise notions of relative necessity in terms of simple strict conditionals. However, Humberstone and others have highlighted various flaws with Smiley’s now standard account of relative necessity. In their recent article, Hale and Leech propose a novel account of relative necessity designed to overcome the problems facing the standard account. Nevertheless, the current article argues that Hale & Leech’s account suffers from its own defects, some of which (...) Hale & Leech are aware of but underplay. To supplement this criticism, the article offers an alternative account of relative necessity which overcomes these defects. This alternative account is developed in a quantified modal propositional logic and is shown model-theoretically to meet several desiderata of an account of relative necessity. (shrink)

Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.

In this paper, I explore how the architecture of homes—defined minimally by walls, doors, and a roof—structures not only physical shelter but also the conditions for basic human functioning, privacy, and autonomy. Drawing on Jeremy Waldron and Richard Epstein, I show that adequate dwelling is a precondition for the exercise of fundamental freedoms: without a secure, delimited space, individuals are exposed to the arbitrary control of others and deprived of the capabilities necessary for a minimally dignified life. The article distinguishes (...) between housing rights and the moral right to housing, emphasizing that statutory recognition alone does not secure the substantive functions that homes enable. I further engage Alejandra Mancilla’s reasoning on the right of necessity to address extreme cases of housing deprivation, highlighting the tension between private property and urgent human needs. By situating dwelling within the broader architecture of public and private spaces, this study elucidates the moral duties of states in ensuring access to adequate housing and, importantly, contends that failure to do so generates conditions in which violations of property may be justified. (shrink)

General consensus has it that contingencies lack the requisite modal umph to serve as explanations for the modal status of necessities. The central aim of this paper is to show that this received opinion is incorrect: contingent necessity-makers are in fact possible. To do so, I identify certain conditions the satisfaction of which entail the possibility of contingent necessity-makers. I then argue for two broad instances where these conditions are satisfied. Consequently, the associated necessities in fact have contingent (...) necessity-makers. (shrink)

In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive (...) or localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics. (shrink)

Medical necessity (claiming that a medical intervention or care is – at minimum – reasonable, appropriate and acceptable) depends on empirical evidence and on the interpretation of that evidence. Evidence and its interpretation define the standard of care. This commentary argues that both the evidence base and its interpretation are currently weak gatekeepers. Empirical meta-research suggests that very few medical interventions have high quality evidence in support of their effectiveness and very few of them also have relatively thorough assessments (...) of their potential harms. Therefore, evidence on the risk-benefit ratios carries almost always very large uncertainty. Arbitration about medical necessity is thus left to the interpretation process. Professional guidelines are notoriously unreliable and biased in this regard. Regulatory approval ends up being the key arbitrator, but over the years the regulatory process has been subverted. Regulatory approval currently does not mean that an intervention has a favourable risk-benefit ratio, but simply that it can be marketed, sold and made profit from. The process leads to a tragedy of commons where the final victim is society at large: medical necessity is invoked as an alibi for medicine to absorb societal resources. (shrink)

Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.

This paper discusses some serious difficulties for what we shall call the standard account of various kinds of relative necessity, according to which any given kind of relative necessity may be defined by a strict conditional - necessarily, if C then p - where C is a suitable constant proposition, such as a conjunction of physical laws. We argue, with the help of Humberstone, that the standard account has several unpalatable consequences. We argue that Humberstone’s alternative account has (...) certain disadvantages, and offer another - considerably simpler - solution. (shrink)

The Master Argument, recorded by Epictetus, indicates that Diodorus had deduced a contradiction from the conjoint assertion of three propositions. The Argument, which has to do with necessity and contingency and therefore with freedom, has attracted the attention of logicians above all. There have been many attempts at reconstructing it in logical terms, without excessive worry about historical plausibility and with the foregone conclusion that it was sophistic since it directly imperilled our common sense notion of freedom. This text (...) takes exception to recent tradition, translating the propositions into logical terms. The propositions figuring in The Master Argument are interpreted in terms of temporal modal logic where both the modalities and the statements they govern have chronological indices. This means that the force of the argument comes not from purely logical or modal considerations, but from our experience of time. (shrink)

This article discusses the status of necessity in an ontology that acknowledges only contingent events and objects, focusing particularly on the relationship between thought and necessity in an ontological framework where thought is seen as a contingent occurrence with a contingent structure. To this end, I closely analyse Deleuze’s criticisms of the Kantian transcendental project and his reworking of the Kantian notion of time and discuss Michael Ardoline's recent work on the relationship between difference and necessity. I (...) make two main claims. The first is that the pure form of time or difference is a transcendental condition for all events and entities (speculative temporalism). The second is that the future is ruled by radical contingency and has the potential to radically transform and destroy everything (enhanced Humeanism). I bring these two facets of Deleuze’s metaphysics of time to address the initial issue of the relationship between necessity and thought. Consequently, I argue that thinking can produce well-grounded necessities, but these well-grounded necessities remain ontologically precarious, as the conditions that sustain them are always subject to potential disruption and destruction in the future. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemic status of Humean diagnosis itself, and uses that examination as the entry point for a broader inquiry into the structure of philosophical self-reference. Beginning from Hume's three central claims — that causal connection is a psychological projection rather than a feature of the world, that inductive inference carries no logical guarantee, and that testimony for miracles is structurally self-defeating — we ask whether these diagnoses are themselves necessary or contingent. We argue that they occupy an (...) unstable middle position: stronger than ordinary empirical generalizations, yet unable to secure the framework-external necessity they appear to claim. This instability generates a self-undermining structure, which we situate within a broader typology of philosophical self-reference organized under the figure of the Ouroboros. The paper opens with a methodological preamble: a three-layer framework distinguishing ontological, epistemological, and linguistic levels of philosophical inquiry. These levels are mutually incommensurable. The history of philosophy's two major turns — the epistemological and the linguistic — are understood as successive filters, each constraining the preceding level within its own domain without issuing first-order verdicts at that level. This framework governs the categorization of all arguments in this paper — and is itself an adopted instrument subject to the same fallibilist treatment it recommends for everything else. The Ouroboros — the serpent that consumes its own tail — organizes two phenomena that require careful distinction: the self-directed character of philosophical critique, and the circularity that attends any attempt to justify the tools of justification. We argue that not all instances of either are epistemically vicious, and that the correct diagnosis depends on identifying which type of self-reference is operative. A key clarification accompanies the typology's application to Hume: the Ouroboros framework relocates Hume's self-undermining difficulty from the epistemological level — where the original problem of using a questioned capacity to assess that capacity's standing remains unresolved — to the logical level, where the question of whether the diagnoses are self-refuting admits a cleaner answer. This relocation is a problem replacement, not a problem solution, and the paper acknowledges it as such. We address logical revision, Quinean holism, and their internal tensions, arriving at a logical pluralism that the paper's epistemological commitments can accommodate without instability. The apparent categorical status of the law of non-contradiction is recharacterized as the historical projection of classical logic's practical dominance, not a framework-external metaphysical constraint. We construct a taxonomy of necessity after Hume, in which constitutive necessity emerges as the most robust survivor — not because it escapes Humean critique but because it operates at a different level than the critique targets. The necessary-but-not-sufficient and sufficient-but-not-necessary structure of hinge propositions is developed with precision. The paper concludes with a compact treatment of probability as an epistemic instrument. (shrink)

Suppose a driverless car encounters a scenario where harm to at least one person is unavoidable and a choice about how to distribute harms between different persons is required. How should the driverless car be programmed to behave in this situation? I call this the moral design problem. Santoni de Sio defends a legal-philosophical approach to this problem, which aims to bring us to a consensus on the moral design problem despite our disagreements about which moral principles provide the correct (...) account of justified harm. He then articulates an answer to the moral design problem based on the legal doctrine of necessity. In this paper, I argue that Santoni de Sio’s answer to the moral design problem does not achieve the aim of the legal-philosophical approach. This is because his answer relies on moral principles which, at least, utilitarians have reason to reject. I then articulate an alternative reading of the doctrine of necessity, and construct a partial answer to the moral design problem based on this. I argue that utilitarians, contractualists and deontologists can agree on this partial answer, even if they disagree about which moral principles offer the correct account of justified harm. (shrink)

In the last 30 years much philosophical discussion has been generated by Kripke’s proof of the necessity of origin for material objects presented in footnote 56 of ‘Naming and Necessity’. I consider the two most popular reconstructions of Kripke’s argument: one appealing to the necessary sufficiency of origin, and the other employing a strong independence principle allegedly derived from the necessary local nature of prevention. I argue that, to achieve a general result, both reconstructions presuppose an implicit Humean (...) atomistic thesis of recombination, according to which any two (non-overlapping) possible objects can simultaneously coexist in one and the same world. Yet recombination ill accords with the other assumptions of the proofs. I also argue that the locality of prevention does not entail strong independence. (shrink)

The traditional view that all logical truths are metaphysically necessary has come under attack in recent years. The contrary claim is prominent in David Kaplan’s work on demonstratives, and Edward Zalta has argued that logical truths that are not necessary appear in modal languages supplemented only with some device for making reference to the actual world (and thus independently of whether demonstratives like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ are present). If this latter claim can be sustained, it strikes close to the (...) heart of the traditional view. I begin this paper by discussing and refuting Zalta’s argument in the context of a language for propositional modal logic with an actuality connective (section 1). This involves showing that his argument in favor of real world validity his preferred explication of logical truth, is fallacious. Next (section 2) I argue for an alternative explication of logical truth called general validity. Since the rule of necessitation preserves general validity, the argument of section 2 provides a reason for affirming the traditional view. Finally (section 3) I show that the intuitive idea behind the discredited notion of real world validity finds legitimate expression in an object language connective for deep necessity. (shrink)

Finean essentialists take metaphysical necessity to be metaphysically explained by essence. But whence the explanatory power of essence? A recent wave of criticism against the Finean account has put pressure on essentialists to answer this question. Wallner and Vaidya (2020) have responded by offering an axiomatic account of the explanatory power of essence. This paper discusses their account in light of some recent criticism by Bovey (2022). Building on work by Glazier (2017), Bovey succeeds in showing that Wallner and (...) Vaidya’s account is in need of modification and clarification. In this paper, I take up Bovey’s challenge and argue that Wallner and Vaidya have the resources available to incorporate the necessary modifications. I discuss the details of this modification, specifically, the question of what kind of metaphysical explanation is at work in the explanation of the necessity of essence itself. To get clear on this, I will introduce the distinction between generative and non-generative metaphysical explanation. In this way the paper contributes to both, the debate about whether essences can explain necessity and to the ongoing debate about metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

Upward monotonic semantics for necessity modals give rise to Ross’s Puzzle: they predict that □φ entails □(φ ∨ ψ), but common intuitions about arguments of this form suggest they are invalid. It is widely assumed that the intuitive judgments involved in Ross’s Puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that the truth of each disjunct (φ, ψ) is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I introduce two pieces (...) of data that this analysis fails to explain. Analyzing this data, I argue, suggests that necessity modals with embedded disjunctions license ‘Independence’ inferences: from the truth of □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that φ-without-ψ and ψ-without-φ are each compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I outline a bilateral inquisitive semantics for necessity modals that predicts the validity of the Independence inferences. I then argue that the resulting theory should be understood as one on which disjunctions denote pluralities of propositions, and necessity modals behave like collective predicates applied to these pluralities. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that using lethal or otherwise serious force in self-defense is justified only when three conditions are satisfied: first, there are some grounds for the defender to give priority to his own interests over those of the attacker (whether because the attacker has lost the protection of his right to life, for example, or because of the defender’s prerogative to prefer himself to others); second, the harm used is proportionate to the threat thereby averted; third, the harm (...) is necessary to avert that threat. The first and second conditions have been exhaustively discussed, but the third has been oddly neglected. Meanwhile a prominent school of thought has arisen, in the ethics of war, which seeks to ground the justification of killing in war in principles of individual self-defense. They too have failed to offer any substantive analysis of necessity, while at the same time appealing to it when it suits them to do so. In this paper, I attempt a detailed analysis of the necessity constraint on defensive force, and explore the implications of that analysis for the attempt to transpose principles of individual self-defense into the context of warfare. (shrink)

Myles Brand and Marshall Swain advocate the principle that if A is the set of conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the occurrence of B, then if C is a set of conditions individually necessary for the occurrence of B, every member of C is a member of A. I agree with John Barker and Risto Hilpinen who each argue that this principle is not true for causal necessity and sufficiency, but I disagree with their claim that it (...) is true for logical necessity and sufficiency. The original appeal of the principle may be due to confusing two kinds of totality: to say that when every member of set A obtains, then every condition necessary for E obtains is not to say that every condition necessary for E is a member of A. All the authors mentioned believe that causal necessity precludes logical necessity. I deny this on the basis of an example from kinematics. Hume has not refuted definitions of causation in terms of logically necessary and sufficient conditions, nor have Brand and Swain. (shrink)

In a growing number of papers one encounters arguments to the effect that certain philosophical views are objectionable because they would imply that there are necessary truths for whose necessity there is no explanation. For short, they imply that there are brute necessities. Therefore, the arguments conclude, the views in question should be rejected in favor of rival views under which the necessities would be explained. This style of argument raises a number of questions. Do necessary truths really require (...) explanation? Are they not paradigms of truths that either need no explanation or automatically have one, being in some sense self-explanatory? If necessary truths do admit of explanation or even require it, what types of explanation are available? Are there any necessary truths that are truly brute? This chapter surveys various answers to these questions, noting their bearing on arguments from brute necessity and arguments concerning the mind–body problem. (shrink)

In all three of his major works on moral philosophy, Kant conceives of moral obligation, moral permissibility, and moral impermissibility in decidedly modal terms, namely in terms of moral necessity, moral possibility, and moral impossibility respectively. This terminology is not Kant’s own, however, but has a rather long history stretching back to a group of Spanish Jesuit theologians in the early seventeenth century, and it was used in two contexts: first, in the context of divine and human action to (...) explain how volition can be both metaphysically and physically free and yet morally necessary, and second in a deontic context to refer to moral obligation, permissibility, and impermissibility. In this paper, my first and primary aim is to sketch the way in which four of Kant’s most important German predecessors, namely Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Christian August Crusius, used the language of moral necessity, possibility, and impossibility in both the context of action and obligation. My second, more limited aim is to suggest that Kant’s use of these terms can be clarified by taking this background into consideration. (shrink)

Necessity and Philosophy in Plato's Republic offers an interpretation of the concept of necessity in what is perhaps Plato's most read dialogue. The book argues that to read the Republic through the lens of necessity is to reimagine what this pervasive concept might mean for us and for the limits of human reason.

Spinoza’s guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza’s Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen articles by Don Garrett on Spinoza’s philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive analysis of Spinoza’s theories (...) of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity—and of the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve problems in the interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, they elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of such predecessors and contemporaries as Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. The book also offers four important and substantial new replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness. (shrink)

Like many realists about causation and causal powers, Aristotle uses the language of necessity when discussing causation, and he appears to think that by invoking necessity, he is clarifying the manner in which causes bring about or determine their effects. In so doing, he would appear to run afoul of Humean criticisms of the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect. The claim that causes necessitate their effects may be understood—or attacked—in several ways, however, and so (...) whether the view or its criticism is tenable depends on how we understand the necessitation claim. In fact, Aristotelian efficient causation may be said to involve two distinct necessary connections: one is a relation between causes considered as potential, while the other relates them considered as active. That is, the claims that (1) what has the power to heat necessarily heats what has the power to be heated, and that (2) a particular flame which is actually under a pot necessarily heats it, both of which appear to be true for Aristotle, involve distinct notions of necessity. The latter kind of necessity is based on the facts, as Aristotle sees them, about change, whereas the former is based in the nature of properties. Though different, both kinds of necessity are instances of what contemporary philosophers would call metaphysical necessity, and together they also amount to a theory of causal determination. (shrink)

Deliberation issues in decision, and so might be taken as a paradigmatic volitional activity. Character, on the other hand, may appear pre-volitional: the dispositions that constitute it provide the background against which decisions are made. Bernard Williams offers an intriguing picture of how the two may be connected via the concept of practical necessities, which are at once constitutive of character and deliverances of deliberation. Necessities are thus the glue binding character and the will, allowing us to take responsibility for (...) our characters. Intriguing though the picture may be, it did not receive a thorough elaboration in Williams’s work. My aim here is to work out and defend what I take to be the most valuable aspect of Williams’s view of agency: its model of the way character and the will can jointly determine agency through mutual constitution. However, I argue that Williams’s attempt to use this model to ground his attack on Kantian morality does not succeed, because the primacy Williams accords to character over the will cannot yield the appropriate kind of normative authority, even from the perspective of the agent. I urge that we retain Williams’s model of the interaction between character and the will, modified to allow the will an authority that is not derived from the necessity of character. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Necessity and Contingency as Degrees of Stability Necessity (Contingency) and Description Cleopatra's Nose and Other Category Mistakes Making a Difference Emplotment Prophets of Contingency References.

The influential public health ethics framework proposed by Childress et al. includes five “justificatory conditions,” two of which are “necessity” and “least infringement.” While the framework points to important moral values, we argue it is redundant for it to list both necessity and least infringement because they are logically equivalent. However, it is ambiguous whether Childress et al. would endorse this view, or hold the two conditions distinct. This ambiguity has resulted in confusion in public health ethics discussions (...) citing the Childress et al. framework, as demonstrated by debate between Resnik and Wilson and Dawson. We analyse this debate to resolve these ambiguities. Finally, we argue that the necessity/least infringement principle of the Childress et al. framework applies only in cases in which only one intervention is to be implemented to achieve one specific goal. In other cases, it is not essential to require that only the least infringing intervention be implemented. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of logic, from Aristotle to Gödel, of understanding a proof from the concepts of necessity and causality. Gödel's attempts to define provability in terms of necessity led him to the distinction of formal and absolute (abstract) provability. Turing's definition of mechanical procedure by means of a Turing machine (TM) and Gödel's definition of a formal system as a mechanical procedure for producing formulas prompt us to understand formal provability as a mechanical causality. We (...) propose a formalism which makes explicit the mechanical causal nature of a TM's work. We claim that Gödel's axiomatised ontotheology and his ontological proof give a clue for the understanding of the concept of absolute provability and the pattern of the corresponding absolute completeness proof, respectively. (shrink)

In the metaphysics of modality, one finds a distinction between two families of modalities: the so-called ‘objective’, ‘real’ or ‘circumstantial’ modalities and the ‘non-objective’, ‘non-real’ or ‘non-circumstantial’ modalities. The guiding thought is that in some intuitive sense the former modalities pertain to contingency in worldly circumstance—how things could have genuinely otherwise been—whereas the latter do not. Moreover the distinction has acquired importance through attempts to elucidate the modality of metaphysical necessity by assigning it a distinctive role within the objective (...) modalities. In this paper I use the resources of higher-order modal logic to explore how one might systematize these ideas. I present a formal tension which shows that one natural way of systematizing them is unstable. And whilst I show that there are ways of stabilizing the guiding picture, even the best of them involves deeply non-trivial departures from how that picture is ordinarily understood. I conclude by revisiting the motivation for the underlying picture of modalities. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Spinoza’s claim that ideas of reason are necessary. While Spinoza understands necessity to imply that something cannot be otherwise, the author shows that Spinoza employs a narrower notion of necessity that applies only to some things, what LeBuffe describes as omnipresence: existing at all times and in all places. This account of the sense in which the ideas of reason are necessary makes evident that such ideas have especially strong motivational power. Our affects are (...) more powerful when they represent a thing present, which entails that our ideas representing things as always present and, thus, our ideas of reason are more powerful. On this basis, the author concludes that ideas of reason have a special motivating force, which explains how they serve as commands or dictates. (shrink)

In this paper, a hylomorphic reading of Kant’s account of laws of nature is discussed. It is argued that existing interpretations cannot make sense of Kant’s commitment to empirical laws of nature, because they construe matters in such a way that there is an opposition between the necessity that comes with lawhood and the empiricality—and hence contingency—of empirical laws of nature. It is laid out how a hylomorphic reading does not come with said opposition and is thus a promising (...) candidate for making sense of Kant’s commitment to empirical laws of nature. Furthermore, the distinction between two senses of necessity that are in play regarding empirical laws of nature is proposed: for one, the necessity of the causal connection and, then, the necessity of a specific law’s being a law. Clearly distinguishing these two senses of necessity removes interpretative pressure towards the existing interpretations and thus opens up the possibility of a hylomorphic reading. It is further shown how such a reading, including its connection to Kant’s account of cognitive capacities, allows one to comprehend many passages in which Kant employs hylomorphic vocabulary. Indeed, Kant is arguing in these passages for a hylomorphic account. (shrink)

Kripke and putnam have argued that metaphysical necessity is truth in all possible worlds, Hence is a kind of logica necessity; it is this claim I argue against. My argument proceeds by way of my considering and elaborating an example to show that although 'gold has atomic number 79' be counted a metaphysically necessary truth, There is a possible world in which it is false; it turns out to be for all I show here at most a physical (...) necessity, True in all those worlds structurally similar to the actual world. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the semantics for a given language should be taken to be given by a body of semantic requirements — in contrast to the two standard conceptions of a semantics, under which it is taken either to be an assignment of semantic values to the expressions of the language or to be a theory of truth for the sentences of the language.

Grounding necessitarianism (GN) is the view that full grounds necessitate what they ground. Although GN has been rather popular among philosophers, it faces important counterexamples: For instance, A=[Socrates died] fully grounds C=[Xanthippe became a widow]. However, A fails to necessitate C: A could have obtained together with B=[Socrates and Xanthippe were never married], without C obtaining. In many cases, the debate essentially reduces to whether A indeed fully grounds C – as the contingentist claims – or if instead C is (...) fully grounded in A+, namely A plus some supplementary fact S (e.g. [Xanthippe was married to Socrates]) – as the necessitarian claims. Both sides typically agree that A+ necessitates C, while A does not; they disagree on whether A or A+ fully grounds C. This paper offers a novel defence of the claim that, in these typical cases, unlike A+, A fails to fully ground C – thereby bringing further support to GN. First and foremost, unlike A+, A fails to fully ground C because it fails to contain just what is relevant to do so, in two distinct senses – explanatory and generative relevance. Second, going for A, rather than A+, as a full ground undermines not just grounding necessitarianism, but modally weaker views which even contingentists may want to preserve. (shrink)

Discussions of closely associated notions of practical necessity, volitional necessity, and moral incapacity have profited from a focus on cases of agential crisis to further our understanding of how features of an agent’s character might bind her. This paper turns to agents in crises in order to connect this way of being bound to the phenomenon of moral heroism. The connection is fruitful in both directions. Importing practical necessity into examinations of moral heroism can explain the special (...) sense of bindingness moral heroes frequently express while preserving the status of heroic acts as supererogatory. It also helps explain how heroes persevere and act as so few others do. On the other hand, the context of moral heroism allows a fuller development of some features of the concept of practical necessity, shedding more illuminating light on the roots of practical necessity in character through recent findings in the psychology of moral exemplars. (shrink)

This essay explores Leibniz’s philosophy on moral necessity. It argues that the distinctive feature of this modality is that the notion of _value_ — good or perfection — plays an essential role in the determination and explanation of choice. As such, Leibnizian moral necessity is opposed to both metaphysical necessity and to “any value-free mechanism determining choice”.

The article reviews recent developments in England in the law of necessity as a defence to crime and calls for its further extension. It argues that the defence of necessity presents the criminal law with difficult questions of competing values and the ordering of harms. English law has taken a nuanced position on the respective roles of the courts and the legislature in the ordering of harms, although the development of the law has been pragmatic rather than coherently (...) theorised. The law has granted necessity some scope as an exculpatory principle in the law of general defences, but it has also respected the primacy of the legislature as the legitimate arbiter of many of the competitions of value that necessity throws up. The recognition of necessity has not been in the form of a single unified defence of that name. Rather it has taken the form of a number of defences, based on a principle of necessity, but with different nomenclature and different rationales. This approach to necessity is defended as right in terms of principle and policy. Any further development of necessity as a general defence should be restricted to two contexts, namely those of emergencies, and of conflicts of duty, where a danger of death or serious injury is present. (shrink)

By means of careful analysis of relevant writings by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, David James argues that the concept of practical necessity is key to understanding the nature and extent of human freedom. Practical necessity means being, or believing oneself to be, constrained to perform certain actions in the absence of other, more attractive options, or by the high costs involved in pursuing other options. Agents become subject to practical necessity as a result of economic, (...) social, and historical forces over which they have, or appear to have, no effective control, and the extent to which they are subject to it varies according to the amount of economic and social power that one agent possesses relative to other agents. The concept of practical necessity is also shown to take into account how the beliefs and attitudes of social agents are in large part determined by social and historical processes in which they are caught up, and that the type of motivation that we attribute to agents must recognize this. Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx shows how Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, in contrast to Hobbes, explain the emergence of the conditions of a free society in terms of a historical process that is initially governed by practical necessity. The role that this form of necessity plays in explaining history necessity invites the following question: to what extent are historical agents genuinely subject to both practical and historical necessity? (shrink)

My main purpose in this article is to present an argument for the idea that necessity qua truth in all possible worlds, without other qualifications, leads us to contradiction. If we do not want to accept the contradiction, we will face a dilemma: or accepting that everything we take as contingent is in fact necessary, or accepting that we cannot translate some sentences – at least the indexed to worlds sentences – to the possible worlds vocabulary. We have an (...) intuition – and we develop an argument for it – that if “P”, evaluated in w*, is a contingent truth, so it cannot be the case that “P in w*” is a necessary truth. Generally, the argument tries to show that “P”, evaluated in w*, and “P in w*” are made true by the same contingent fact. If we suppose that “P in w*” is necessary, we would have to suppose that the fact that makes it true is also necessary, which would be contradictory with the fact that makes “P” true in w*, if we accept that what makes “P” in w* and “P in w*” true is the same fact. I attain such an aim by presenting an argument that is divided in two parts, one to imply the contradiction and the other to show that there is no relevant difference between the indicated sentences, by showing how the dilemma arises, and by answering some possible objections. This is an important objective because the possible worlds vocabulary is the default vocabulary to treat the modalities of necessity and possibility. And if it is flawed, it is important that we identify the flaw and fix it – which is exactly what we intend to do at the end of this article, by suggesting some qualification at the necessity notion, that the necessity is the native truth in all possible worlds. And this would save the possible worlds vocabulary from the presented objection. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an alternative to the standard, mechanistic/fatalistic account of causal necessity, one compatible with the existence of laws of nature but not deterministic in the way this is usually understood.