Abstract

During the periods when logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy were ascendant, Brand Blanshard was defending necessity in his writing and in his teaching. The last five chapters of the second volume of The Nature of Thought, published in 1940, were devoted to necessity, and no less than four chapters of Reason and Analysis, appearing in 1962, were on the same subject. The new realism that has supplanted positivism and language philosophy on the American scene should, it would seem, be sympathetic to Blanshard’s insistence that there are physical necessities. For, according to the new realism, the constituents of gross things are real entities that account for the behavior of these things. One would think that it would be recognized that this is possible only if that behavior were a necessary outcome of having those constituents. For, were it only contingent, the behavior could not genuinely be laid at the feet of those constituents. All expectations have been disappointed here, for the new realism remains uncompromisingly Humean when it comes to necessity. Necessity is still, as in the days of positivism and language philosophy, a matter of concepts or linguistic terms and not a matter of things. But if I am right that the new realism is thus far developed only in a one-sided way, then in the near future we shall see a more coherent realism that has embodied many of the features of the doctrine of necessity elaborated by Blanshard.