Kinds of Necessity: A Commentary on E.J. Lowe’s Paper “Kinds, Essence, and Natural Necessity”

Abstract

Jonathan Lowe offers a subtle but nonetheless determined attack on the view, recently espoused by some philosophers, that a Theory of Causality and Natural Laws requires nothing less than “metaphysical necessity”, if natural laws are to be something more than mere regularities. On this view, natural or nomological necessity is supposed to be as strong as logical necessity in virtue of combining causal necessitation with the logic of possible worlds. For Jonathan Lowe, however, laws of nature are not metaphysically necessary. Instead, he defends a Contingency Theory of Natural Laws, be they causal or not, although he rejects a Regularity Theory. I shall briefly reconstruct Lowe’s argument and then point to some questions which arise about it.