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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.

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’.

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 provides an overview of the responses to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the reception history, and argues for the need to recover the breadth of interpretation her work invites. The writers discuss the concept of authorial intent as it relates to O’Connor and lay out their premise that author, text, and audience all play roles in the process of meaning making. The authors also provide chapter summaries for each of the essays included in the volume.

Leibniz’s theory of the will is explored and linked to his theory of power, establish that active and passive potencies for him are of technical but ultimately lesser status that intellectual activity. This discounts these potencies as candidates for power, indicating that ontological power must be found elsewhere in Leibniz’s philosophy, in the notion that the possible claims or pretends to existence.

To investigate the relationship between the possible and law, Leibniz’s early combinatorial work, replete with legal examples is examined in technical detail. The chapter argues that Leibniz regards combinatorial activity as the sole way in which human mind operates, and thus regards it as an Urdoxa in the senses of Husserl and Deleuze.

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 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’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.

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.

This chapter centres on what it terms the Vagueness Trilemma: that what may impress as the only three possible types of view about what vagueness is—namely, that it is a matter of semantic indeterminacy, that it originates in rebus, and the epistemicist idea that it is a matter of our ineluctable ignorance about fully determinate matters— are each open to serious, indeed arguably fatal, objections. The chapter is organized about the possible attitudes to three interrelated, nodal theses. Bivalence—are borderline statements bivalent? Third possibility—do they possess some third alethic status—lack of truth value or some third truth value? And Verdict Exclusion: is knowledge of truth value precluded in borderline cases? It is argued that there are five consistent combinations of acceptance and non-acceptance of the three nodal issues, and that an attitude of agnosticism to all three, and a consequent broadly intuitionistic attitude to vagueness, is the way out of the Trilemma.

The mere possibilities are the possibilities that are not also actual. It would seem that they have no being but some attempts to account for them effectively give being to them: to say that they are actual at some other world or that they reside within the causal powers of things. This seems to grant mere possibilities both non-being and being, against Parmenideanism. Instead, a fictionalist stance is advanced wherein mere possibilities are fictional recombinations of already existing elements. Such recombinations have no being themselves but they can still be grounded in what there is. The Parmenidean preference is for a grounding in nature rather than other possible worlds since our knowledge of other worlds is largely informed by our knowledge of this world.