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This chapter characterizes essentialism, and distinguishes essentialism about individuals from essentialism about natural kinds, arguing that the first does, but the second need not, involve de re (as opposed to de dicto) modality. It is argued that given certain plausible assumptions, essentialism about individuals involves a commitment to necessary a posteriori truth, although the commitment is not inevitable. The implications of the concepts of possible worlds and identity across possible worlds (‘transworld identity’) are discussed.

This chapter seeks to bring to light some of Keith Donnellan’s underappreciated views concerning the surprising metaphysical claim that is supposed to follow from a popular theory of reference. The claim is that certain “theoretical identifications of science”—that is, statements of the form “Water is H₂O” or “Gold is the element with atomic number 79”—are necessary truths even though they can be known only through a posteriori or empirical methods, not through a priori reasoning or analysis. Such claims were famously made by Kripke and Putnam in the 1970s. Donnellan’s views on the matter are underappreciated, because not all of them have been published. But the views that emerge from both Donnellan’s published paper “Kripke and Putnam on Natural Kind Terms” and Nathan Salmon’s discussion of Donnellan’s unpublished papers focus on a set of issues that are underdeveloped in the usual discussions of “the necessary a posteriori”.

This chapter introduces conflicts between standard Western theist beliefs about God, clustered about His being creator and sustainer of all, and belief in necessary truths. Western theists believe that God is always the source of all that He does not include and that nothing was co-eternal with Him. A truth’s ontology consists of the real things its being true involves: Fido, for instance, is part of the ontology of the truth that Fido exists. The problem is this: if necessary truths not about God have an ontology including real things outside God, these things would have been co-eternal with Him, and He would not have been their source. The chapter also introduces perfect being theology — a method the book employs — and explains the theist doctrines of creation and conservation.

This chapter rebuts objections to the general project of explaining the truth and modal status of necessary truths. It also explains the sense in which secular necessary truths depend on God and completes the case for the book’s theory as against deity theories.

This chapter argues that the new tracking view is superior to externalist rivals: process reliabilism, the safety view, and the relevant alternatives view. This is because of the generality problem, and treatments of reflective knowledge, lottery propositions, direction of fit with the world, the power property, and knowledge of logical and other necessary truths. A new view of logical truth is introduced, which is in keeping with the tracking view that knowledge is a matter of responsiveness to the way the world is.

Examines the notion of necessity and the special problems it poses for knowledge. The conventionalist response is to see necessary truth as the product of thinking and the decision to act in certain ways. Against this view, it is argued that the complex grammar of the notion of necessity can be appreciated without seeking a definition of it, let alone an explanation of its source. Even though contingent facts about the processes of human knowledge cannot hope to explain the necessary truths, attention to those contingent facts might explain our acceptance of necessary truth and the role it plays in the ways we think about the world.

Concerned with the question of how our beliefs in necessary truths can be reasonable. In the course of considering this general question, I argue that our belief in objective value—that some things are good and others bad—commits us to the view that such beliefs are capable of being reliable, at least to some extent. And this belief in reliability, in its turn, commits us to the idea that value can make a difference; that the fact that it would be good that something should be so, for instance, can have a bearing on the ways things are—by having a bearing on what beliefs we form. So objective goodness can explain.

Analytic philosophy of religion was gestated in the nineteen forties, born in the early fifties, spent its childhood in the sixties, and its adolescence in the seventies and early eighties. Since then it has grown into adulthood, and it reached the turn of the millennium in a state of vigorous maturity, with decline and senile degeneration nowhere in sight. This chapter unpacks this metaphor by tracing the main stages in the development of this discipline, beginning with the preoccupation with religious language, moving on to focus on the pros and cons of theism, and leading to the much wider range of topics which are currently of interest to analytic philosophers of religion. Topics discussed in some detail include positivism and the later philosophy of Wittgenstein in their relation to religious language, the current state of the debates concerning the theistic arguments and the problem of evil, as well as Reformed epistemology, the debate concerning the nature of divine providence, and the important but under-explored topic of the nature of necessary truth. The chapter closes by situating analytic philosophy of religion in relation to other important contemporary movements in the philosophy of religion.

This chapter shows how some kinds of knowledge are not readily understandable in terms of adequate information if for no other reason than they seem not to be linked with specific truths. Knowledge of people, places, and things and knowledge how are examples. A priori knowledge is sometimes thought to be a species of knowledge requiring separate treatment, but unlike knowledge how and knowledge of people, places, and things, when S knows something a priori, there is a readily identifiable truth she believes. The a priori is to be distinguished from the necessary. A proposition's being known a priori does not ensure that it is necessary, nor does a proposition's being necessary ensure that it can be known a priori.

This chapter explores philosophical issues in metaphysics. It begins by distinguishing between de re and de dicto necessity. All necessity is uniformly de re; there is simply no such thing as de dicto necessity. Indeed, in the glory days of positivism, all necessity was understood as uniformly the same: a necessary truth was always an a priori truth, while contingent truths were always a posteriori. The chapter then assesses the concept of antirealism. Antirealism is always an error theory: there is some sort of mistake or distortion or sloppiness embedded in the usual discourse. The chapter also considers paradoxes, causation, conceptual analysis, scientific mysteries, the possible worlds theory of modality, the concept of a person, the nature of existence, and logic and propositions.

In a growing number of papers one encounters arguments to the effect that certain philosophical views are objectionable because they would imply that there are necessary truths for whose necessity there is no explanation. For short, they imply that there are brute necessities. Therefore, the arguments conclude, the views in question should be rejected in favor of rival views under which the necessities would be explained. This style of argument raises a number of questions. Do necessary truths really require explanation? Are they not paradigms of truths that either need no explanation or automatically have one, being in some sense self-explanatory? If necessary truths do admit of explanation or even require it, what types of explanation are available? Are there any necessary truths that are truly brute? This chapter surveys various answers to these questions, noting their bearing on arguments from brute necessity and arguments concerning the mind–body problem.

Carnap’s 1931–2 paper ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’ is surveyed, and Carnap’s criticisms of metaphysics are elucidated. The relationship between Carnap’s views and the critique of metaphysics of the Tractatus is described. Carnap’s criticisms of metaphysics are compared with Wittgenstein’s later critique of metaphysics.

This concluding chapter explains how the theory of moral perception takes full account of the causal element in perception but does not require naturalizing moral properties. However, the theory does require that moral properties have a base in the natural world. They are anchored in the natural world in a way that makes possible moral knowledge and the ethical objectivity that goes with it. The bridge from their naturalistic base to moral judgment often has the intelligibility of the self-evident, and under some conditions it has the reliability of necessary truth. Seeing that an act or a person has a moral property may itself be a manifestation of an intuitive perceptual capacity that has considerable discriminative subtlety regarding descriptive natural properties.

This chapter surveys traditional responses to the skeptical regress problem for justified moral belief. It looks at naturalism, which attempts to derive “ought” from “is” or, more precisely, to formulate a deductively valid argument from non-normative premises to a moral conclusion. An example from Nelson is discussed, and it is shown that this argument, though logically valid, cannot be used to solve the skeptical regress problem.

Theists generally believe that God exists necessarily and that God’s creative activity is responsible for all contingent truths and for all necessary truths. Descartes thought that God’s omnipotence is the key notion. There are three different ways of understanding Descartes. (1) There are no necessary truths if God is omnipotent: “1 + 2 = 3” is as contingent as “snow is white.” (2) Some truths are necessary; for example, the truth that God exists necessarily. (3) There are necessary truths, but none of them is necessarily necessary. Each of these views encounters difficulties. An alternative way of trying to accommodate theistic belief is inspired by Augustine, who describes propositions (the bearers of truth values) as divine thoughts. God chooses which contingent propositions shall be true. God does not choose the necessary truths. They are, rather, characteristic of God’s supremely rational mind. God’s knowing them as necessary explains their necessity.

This chapter examines James Conant’s account of Gottlob Frege’s conception of the special character of the laws of logic. It also examines whether or how that conception figures in Frege’s opposition to ‘psychologistic logicians’ who apparently envisage the possibility of laws of logic contrary to our own. Conant asks two important questions: ‘What is the status of the laws of logic?’ and ‘Wherein does their necessity lie?’. Conant seems to be seeking some explanation of the necessity of necessary truths, or of the impossibility of their being false. The chapter challenges the ‘difficulty’ that Conant claims Frege has in presenting his arguments regarding the laws of logic, as well as his attributing to Frege some kind of explanation of the ‘source’ or ‘ground’ of the special character of logical laws.

In this chapter I look at a famous argument that there are necessary a posteriori truths that comes from Saul Kripke, modified by Keith Donnellan, and discussed by Nathan Salmon. I then raise the question of whether the same mechanism can be used to derive necessary a posteriori truths in ethics, giving a strong version modeled on Kripke and a somewhat weaker version modeled on Donnellan; next I look at a form of moral realism that does not accept necessary a posteriori truths and that is modeled on some features of Richard Boyd’s theory. I conclude by discussing how exemplarist moral theory should be classified, noting that although it is most naturally classified as a virtue theory, it does not make virtue more fundamental than the other categories of moral evaluation, and is not eudaimonist. It arguably does not fit into any common category and permits a number of variations.