NECESSARY EXISTENCE. By Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen.

Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. viii+223. Hard Cover $61.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-

874689-8; Kindle $59.99, ISBN: 978-0-19-106389-3.

Did there have to be anything at all? Many philosophers would be willing to

admit that abstract objects like numbers had to exist no matter what. After all, if there had

been no physical things then zero would have been the number of physical things, and

hence the number zero would have existed. The thesis that there had to be a necessary

concrete thing, on the other hand, is generally regarded as a substantive, perhaps even

extravagant, metaphysical commitment, while the denial that there is such a being is a bit

of modest philosophical common sense.

The present book shows that this attitude is mistaken. Defining ‘concrete’ to mean

‘capable of causation’, the authors present a plethora of arguments for the existence of a

necessary concrete thing. While (as the authors forthrightly admit throughout the book)

philosophical moves can be made to evade each argument, these moves in each case

incur substantive philosophical commitments. The end result is that the denial that there

is a necessary concrete thing turns out to be not so modest after all, but rather a

substantive philosophical thesis with wide-ranging consequences for metaphysics,

epistemology, modal logic, and the theory of explanation. On the other hand, the authors

argue, philosophers willing to accept the existence of a necessary concrete thing can

accept intuitive and straightforward positions in all of these areas. They commend to us

this latter course.

This book is an example of analytic philosophy at its best. It is logically careful. It

uses technical apparatus, including symbolic logic, where this is helpful and avoids

Forthcoming in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

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technicality where possible. It makes a strong case for a philosophically interesting

conclusion while avoiding the temptation to go beyond what its arguments warrant.

While some parts of the book are rather demanding, undergraduate students who have

completed a semester of symbolic logic should be able to follow most of the arguments.

This book is highly recommended to students and scholars in metaphysics and

philosophy of religion.

In arguing that there is a necessary concrete thing, the authors rely on a

conception of metaphysical modality on which it is distinct from narrow logical modality.

That is, some propositions (like the claim that there is water without hydrogen) are

metaphysically impossible although they are not logically contradictory. Further, nearly

every argument in the book requires for its validity that the correct logic of metaphysical

modality be given by the axiom system S5. (More precisely: the arguments rely on the

principle ◊□p→p, which is equivalent to the Brouwer axiom.) These assumptions would

generally be regarded as standard among analytic metaphysicians. However, they are not

wholly uncontroversial. Accordingly, after introducing the general project (chapter one)

the authors explain and defend this approach to the logic and metaphysics of modality

(chapter two). Although the positions are fairly standard, the authors offer some novel

arguments in their favor, including an interesting argument from Gödel’s Second

Incompleteness Theorem for the claim that necessity cannot be identified with provability

in a formal system.

When the authors turn to their main project of defending the existence of a

necessary concrete thing, they begin from the best-known argument for that conclusion,
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the classical cosmological argument from contingency (chapter three) and progress

toward less familiar philosophical territory.

Chapter four examines the modal cosmological argument. Whereas the classical

argument from contingency proceeds from a claim about things having explanations, the

modal cosmological argument proceeds from a claim about things possibly having

explanations.

After giving a qualified defense of a version of the modal cosmological argument

similar to those that exist in previous literature, the authors proceed, in chapter five, to

develop a new version of that argument that relies on a weaker, and therefore less easily

rejected, principle of explicability.

In chapter six, the authors show how a principle of modal uniformity can be used

to support the possibility premises of several of their arguments. The basic idea is that

very similar propositions should be assumed to have the same modal status until proven

otherwise. Thus, if it is possible there be exactly 1000 daffodils, it is presumably also

possible that there be exactly 999 or exactly 1001. This type of principle can be employed

to defend the claim that possibly there is an explanation of why there is at least one

concrete contingent thing, a principle that can in turn be employed in arguments for a

concrete necessary thing.

In chapter seven, the authors present an argument from the existence of necessary

abstracta (e.g., numbers) for the existence of a necessary concrete thing. Though based on

Leibniz’s argument from necessary truths, much of the argumentation in this chapter is

quite novel.
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Chapter eight is devoted to the ‘Gödelian ontological argument’, which is so-

called because it is based on some unpublished notes by the mathematician Kurt Gödel.

While the original Gödel notes, and most subsequent treatments of the argument, require

an intimidating technical apparatus, the authors here manage to present the argument in a

way that should be accessible to anyone with a good grasp of sentential logic. This, in

itself, is quite an achievement. In addition to their lucid presentation of the argument, the

authors also offer a powerful case in its defense.

In chapter nine, the authors rebut a series of common objections to the existence

of a necessary concrete thing. Here their general strategy is to show that the principles of

logic, metaphysics, and epistemology that are commonly used against the existence of a

necessary concrete thing can also be employed in arguments for a necessary concrete

thing. This is simplest in the case of conceivability. It seems to many philosophers that

they can conceive of there being no concrete things at all, so if conceivability is a guide

to possibility then it is possible that there are no concrete things at all, and so there is not

a necessary concrete thing. However, on the other side, it seems to many philosophers

that they can conceive of a necessary concrete thing, so if conceivability is guide to

possibility then a necessary concrete thing is possible and therefore actual. The authors

show that the same kinds of parallel arguments can be constructed for several other

arguments against a necessary concrete thing. Further argument is therefore needed if

opponents want to show that we should favor the negative argument over the positive

one.

Finally, an appendix lists, with very minimal commentary, a total of (by my

count) 33 additional arguments for the existence of a necessary concrete thing.

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As indicated above, the book’s authors acknowledge that philosophical moves are

available for evading each of their individual arguments. However, the arguments rely on

different premises and strategies, so a philosopher who wanted to take a case-by-case

approach to defusing each argument would, by the end of the book, find herself burdened

with a quite substantial collection of philosophical commitments. An opponent, then,

would be better served if she could discover a single strategy for undermining most or all

of the arguments. The arguments are sufficiently diverse that this is no easy task. I can

see three possibilities: the rejection of S5 (more precisely, the Brouwer axiom);

eliminativism, or perhaps a sufficiently strong anti-realism, about causation; or the

rejection of the assumption that any explanation of why there are any contingent concrete

things must involve a necessary concrete thing.

Since the authors provide an extensive defense of S5 in chapter two, I pass this by

to consider the two other objections.

The authors argue for a necessary concrete thing, and most of their arguments

take as premises the existence of contingent concrete things. Those arguments that do not

employ this premise employ other premises about concreteness, such as “Necessarily, if

there is an abstract object, there is a concrete object” (p. 126) or that being concrete is a

positive property (p. 151). A concrete object, recall, is defined as one that possibly causes

something. As a result, a philosopher who rejected the notion of causation entirely would

be in a position to dismiss essentially all of the arguments. If the rejection of causation

were an ad hoc move designed simply to avoid the existence of a necessary concrete

being, this would seem even more desperate than the rejection of S5. However, some

philosophers have seen other reasons for skepticism about causation.

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The authors usually appear to assume a realist ontology of causal powers, though

they occasionally suggest that their arguments are compatible with reductionist views of

causation such as David Lewis’s counterfactual account (e.g., pp. 190–191). How the

arguments would fare on more radical anti-realist views of causation, such as those that

make the truth of causal claims dependent on our explanatory practices, is a question

worthy of further investigation. It may be that rather than undermining the arguments

such views trivialize the results: on such views it might be that everything—even the null

set and the number two—are concrete in Pruss and Rasmussen’s sense, since it is

possible for these things to figure into human explanatory practices in such a way as to

count as causes.

Finally, many (though not all) of the arguments depend on the claim that if there

is an explanation of why there are any concrete contingent beings at all, then there is a

necessary concrete (i.e., causally capable) being. This appears to be based on the

assumption that an explanation of the existence of contingent concrete things would have

to be a non-circular causal explanation. The authors several times make explicit their

assumption that the explanation must be non-circular, but the assumption that it must be

causal remains implicit. Alternatives have been proposed. For instance, I have proposed

that contingent reality could have a grounding explanation (“Foundational Grounding and

the Argument from Contingency,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 2017) and

Derek Parfit has suggested that contingent reality could have a kind of nomological

explanation, in terms of metaphysical laws he calls ‘Selectors’ (“Why Anything? Why

This?”, part 2, London Review of Books, 5 February 1998). These views would
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undermine many of the arguments of this book. Note, though, that these again involve

some heavy-duty philosophical commitments.

I conclude, then, that this book does what it sets out to do: it shows that a wide

range of philosophical views converge on the conclusion that there is a necessary

concrete thing, and that avoiding this conclusion requires taking on substantive

philosophical commitments. The book provides a survey of existing arguments for this

conclusion, but also many new arguments of its own. Finally, in what is perhaps the most

important commendation a reviewer can give to a philosophical book, I predict that

committed opponents of its thesis will find the effort to refute its arguments both

challenging and illuminating. We can look forward to seeing such attempted refutations

appearing in journals for years to come.

KENNETH L. PEARCE

Trinity College Dublin