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There is a set of principles, the Principles of Possibility, that constrains whether a description picks out a genuinely possible world. To grasp the concept of metaphysical necessity is to have tacit knowledge of this set of Principles and to apply them in evaluating modal statements and thoughts. For a statement to be necessary is for it to hold in all descriptions that are not excluded as possible by the principles of possibility. This integrates the metaphysics and epistemology of necessity, without collapsing into mind‐dependence and without a commitment to modal realism. The treatment of the metaphysics validates the modal systems T and S4.

This chapter illustrates how intentional communities translate their bundled values of nonviolence, self-sufficiency, equity, and voluntary simplicity through producing and consuming food. These communities ask what constitutes violence in terms of food and make choices that accord with their specific contexts, goals and geographies, e.g., local vs organic. Catholic worker houses must balance goals of hospitality to the poor with their goals of sustainability. Food rescue helps them combat waste and feed the poor. Whether to eat meat and communal eating become two areas of tension in communities. This chapter explores first, how these communities perform these bundled values in their food practices, including what they eat, what they grow, and what they purchase or gather; and second, the processes and trade-offs of practicing these values.

This chapter explores the role of participatory democracy in sustainability-oriented intentional communities. These communities share goals of social equity and nonviolence and have created a variety of governance structures and practices to enfranchise all residents, ranging from consensus to sociocracy, incorporating nonviolent communication and restorative justice circles. Residents echo Gandhi’s assertion that inner change must precede social change, and communities such as the Possibility Alliance stress integral nonviolence, that nonviolence must permeate all aspects of life. Intentional communities demonstrate multiple patterns for interweaving lives, resolving tensions, and creating balance between their obligations to communities and maintaining integrity of the individual.

This chapter discusses the argument that zombie fictions are in a privileged position to discuss progressive visions of gender politics. Following the book’s larger argument that zombies open spaces of possibility, rather than symbolically represent a particular politics, it briefly reads a number of zombie fictions for their depiction of women’s roles and relates them to literary form. It posits the possibility of something like a “genrécriture feminine” that limits writers in the ways they can depict women in the zombie apocalypse, a possibility explored by contrasting the initial set of texts with an exploration of two novels, Madeleine Roux’s Allison Hewitt is Trapped and Sadie Walker is Stranded. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, while zombie fiction offers possibilities to explore progressive gender positions, few texts actually make use of this possibility.

Lachs recognizes the limiting reality that, even with the protections of tenure, few foster an awareness of alternate possibilities for fear of upsetting the status quo. He nevertheless calls on educators to teach the young how to think and act on possibilities. Such a call is rooted not only in the need to integrate theory and practice but also in recognition of the optionality of our ways of framing the world. Educators who attempt to cultivate critical thinking skills without promoting critical reflection of the actual prove to be hypocritical. That our material prosperity has made available to us even more resources for thinking differently only strengthens the obligation to teach possibilities.

Throughout the preceding text, a series of themes or motifs emerges as recurrent. The conclusion attempts to draw these together. The themes importantly include the name as call or evocation and possibility as a theological value. Here these two are woven together to argue for the call of the possible in every moment as the sense of divine enticement, and as what is named by the divine name. It does so through texts from Augustine, Meister Eckhart, and French Nietzschean essayist and novelist Pierre Klossowski.

This chapter poses the question of “reality”. In opposition to a substantialist vision that has notably characterized modernity, Whitehead develops a processual conception of the real which is made of becomings and individuations. This vision of the real is envisaged starting from three distinct questions: First of all, how to exactly define a process of individuation? This question is treated in its historical aspects (Aristotle and Leibniz) and with respect to contemporary philosophy (Simondon and Deleuze). Secondly, where do the forms, the puissances, the virtualities derive from which accompany any individuation? Starting from this question it is most notably the relation with Platonism and its heritage that is elaborated. And third, which vision of time is implied in a theory of individuation? Even though close to Bergson, Whitehead’s philosophy profoundly differs from it with respect to the status of time and builds up new links with contemporary science.

This chapter’s discussion puts to task the views developed in previous chapters in an attempt to solve four famous philosophical puzzles: the Puzzle of Mary, the Explanatory Gap, the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and the Possibility of Zombies. How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what form does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? These are all questions that are addressed in this chapter.

Houellebecq's conception of life will be considered with reference to his little-discussed first-published work, a study of the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, as well as in relation to his frequently-professed admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer. The work of all three figures would appear to reveal life as the site of misery, cruelty and struggle which can, at best, be opposed by the complaint of literature. This is certainly the view of life in La Possibilité d’une île, Houellebecq's most ambitious science-fiction narrative, in which a humanity dedicated to brutal sexual competition and the ruthless side-lining of the old eventually chooses its own destruction in favour of a placid, featureless, inhuman future. The final section of the book will explore the paradoxes of this situation, examining the ramifications of Houellebecq's ambiguous utopia while also considering how this vision of a meditative existence implies a residual attachment to religion on Houellebecq's part.

The conclusion provides a brief summary of the book’s speculative arguments in the form of ten propositions. These theses are designed to clear the ground for a new theoretical engagement of the problem of worldlessness. They lay the foundations of an affirmative definition of worldlessness. In order to put forward a positive definition of this project, the book concludes by an inversion of the Deleuzian formula for perversion. While Deleuze claimed that perversion consists in the construction of a ‘world without Others’, the conclusion argues that our task today is to engage ‘Others without a world’.

One way of putting powers to work is to use them to ground (at least some) modal truths. One might hold that truths of possibility are true because of the powers of objects. For instance, that it is possible that one more person be in this room is true because of the ambulatory powers of the people in the adjoining rooms. That it is possible that Slow Steve run a fifteen-minute mile is true because of the locomotive powers that Steve has (perhaps along with other powers, such as his respiratory powers). Call the family of stronger or weaker views which hold that possibility claims are true because of powers the ‘Powers Accounts of Possibility,’ or ‘Powers Accounts’ for short. Call a proponent of a Powers Account a ‘Powers Accountant.’ In this paper I present nine objections to Powers Accounts of Possibility and show how a Powers Accountant can respond to them. I begin by providing an exceedingly strong Powers Account and offering three objections to it. The objections will prove useful for forming a more moderate Powers Account. I then subject the more moderate Powers Account to six further objections. In the end, I vindicate a Powers Account of Possibility against all nine objections.