A Study of the Contingency--Necessity Distinction and Its Relation to Religious Claims

FAIN: FT-13945-78

Gordon E. Michalson, Jr
University of South Florida (Tampa, FL 33620-9951)

Leibniz and Kant distinguished between contingent or empirical truths, and necessary or rational truths. Lessing formalized the importance of this distinction for religious thought by speaking of the "ugly ditch" between "contingent truths of history" and the "necessary truths of reason.” This project will focus on, and clarify, these points of view from the standpoint of recent work on the issue of "necessary truth" in analytic philosophy. Works of L. Wittgenstein and W.V.O. Quine will be analyzed to show that the traditional necessity- contingency distinction is certainly outdated and probably invalid.