Volume 112, Issue 2, February 2015
Stephan Leuenberger
Pages 84-112
The Contingency of Contingency
Where does the line between the possible and the impossible fall? One influential answer to this question is succinctly expressed by the thesis that there are no brute necessities. Typically, that thesis is taken to be non-contingent by its proponents. In this paper, I shall argue that if it is necessary, it is so brutely. From this, it follows that there could be brute necessities. But this has no tendency to show that there are any. On the resulting view, the world is full of contingency—but only contingently so.