Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

conceivable that some law of nature may be broken — so a natural law is really just possible rather than absolute. As such, we have contingent natural truths — things that could reasonably be assumed to be true but just happen not to be. Are we left with anything? Well, probably just with — something is going on! That seems to be the only unambiguous absolute necessary statement. But you might argue that it still seems trivial!

‘Identity’ — the idea that a thing must be identical to itself — is arguably another contender for absolute necessity. And there’s the thought that a thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time. In fact, these two ideas are really the basis of Aristotle’s rules of logic, which we will be examining below. I will leave the reader to decide if they still seem trivial.

Leibniz’s ‘principle of sufficient reason’ — that there is an explanation behind everything in the universe — seems to be seeking one or more absolute necessary truths from which all other truths can be delivered. (For Leibniz, this was the existence of God.) But this runs into the problem that there’s no guarantee that the truths derived from absolutes will themselves be absolute necessities.

‘Nothingness is impossible’ is another contender for an absolute necessary statement. Henri Bergson and FH Bradley (Appearance and Reality) took this view. But, logically speaking, the ‘existence’ of nothing is not contradictory. Science tells us only about the differences between things — it is relational — and Leibniz

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