Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

unambiguous absolute necessary statement. But you might argue that it still seems trivial!

Finally, we have ‘absolute contingency’. This simply means things that could not reasonably be considered to be true. Absolute contingencies are things which don’t happen in our world (or at least don’t appear to happen). Note that an ‘absolute contingency’ is not an impossibility! An impossibility is really an absolute necessary truth that something is false — or, we might say, a necessary falsehood. But the term absolute contingency still leaves open a glimmer of possibility. There are some philosophers who believe absolute contingencies really do exist — that is, that all possible worlds are real worlds. Just stating that something does not exist — such as a unicorn — means that it has some kind of existence in our minds, if not in reality.

Philosophy sometimes refers to rational truth as ‘analytic’ truth and to empirical truth as ‘synthetic’ truth. Analytic truth uses deduction to try to reach new conclusions. Synthetic truths use induction.

An analytic statement is a statement that is true because of the meaning of the words. Since it is based on logic, it can be a priori, that is, not derived from observation — so this marks it out as rational rather than empirical. Analytic truth is regarded as necessarily as opposed to contingently true. But as we’ve seen, there are very few contenders for necessary truth. Nevertheless, there are some statements that are so self-obviously true — in other words, our brute facts — that they are considered to be

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