The Sources Of Necessity
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The Sources of Necessity
Author: Tobias Wilsch
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-03-23
It is a currently popular view that essences, laws, and logic are among the grounds of necessity and possibility. Another such idea relates essences, laws, and logic closely to causal explanations and to non-causal grounding explanations. The Sources of Necessity combines those tenets within the view that certain phenomena establish explanations because they exert necessity, a modal force, on the facts. In form of a slogan, the explanatory phenomena are the sources of necessity. The book investigates this idea, and it argues that essences, laws, and logic are the sources of necessity. The investigation contains two different strands, one pertaining to explanation and one to necessity. In the first strand, The Sources of Necessity uses different ways of exerting necessity to analyse the explanatory behaviour of essences, laws, and logic. It investigates the governance of natural laws, the interplay of essences and logic in the generation of absolute necessity, and the existence and nature of metaphysical laws. The second strand concerns the nature of necessity. It is argued that necessity is primitive and that there are several equally fundamental species of necessity. Two particularly thorny questions about necessity that arise from these insights are, 'Why are the sources of necessity themselves necessary?', and 'Why are different kinds of necessity ordered by strength?' The book develops a rationalist view to answer those questions. It says that contingent reality is the result of a cosmogenic sequence that unfolds from essences and logic through the other sources all the way to the contingent facts.
The Sources of Normativity
Author: Christine M. Korsgaard
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 1996-06-28
Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard.
Thinking of Necessity
Jessica Leech sets out a Kant-inspired theory of modality, i.e. possibility and necessity. She argues that we need logical modal concepts as a condition on our ability to think, and metaphysical modal concepts as a condition on our ability to think about the world. Necessity has its source in the laws of thought and the conditions of thought.