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An Essay on Material Necessity1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
At the one extreme stands Hume, who -at least according to common conceptions - rules out entirely the possibility of material or non-logical necessity, and who therefore rules out also the possibility that we might enjoy that sort of certain knowledge that earlier philosophers had assumed as a matter of course to be correlated therewith. At the other extreme stands Adolf Reinach, the hero of our present story, who defends the existence of a wide class of material necessities falling within the domain of what can be a priori known. More precisely, Reinach holds that there are certain categories of entity whose factual instantiation brings with it as a matter of necessity the instantiation of certain other correlated categories. The instantiation of the category color necessitates in this fashion the instantiation of the category visual extension.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 18: Return of the a priori , 1992 , pp. 301 - 322
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1992
Footnotes
My thanks are due to Johannes Brandl, Patricia Donohue, and Philip Hanson for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
References
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