Abstract

This chapter explores the notion of necessary being and defends its explanatory significance. Even if we were to accept the traditional answer involving necessary being to the existence question, its wider significance may be challenged. While it is often incorporated into what has come to be known as the ‘cosmological argument from contingency’ for the existence of God, the bare idea of ‘necessary being’ seems quite thin. The chapter shows how the causal efficacy of a necessary being could figure into an explanation of a contingent universe that affirms the universe's contingency that is an inevitable emanation of the necessary being without thereby conceding an ultimate explanatory surd. It enables one comfortably to steer clear of their necessitarian excesses even while retaining Schopenhauer's cab as a permanent mode of transportation on the way to a philosopher's paradise.