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Concept
Principle of sufficient reason
Summary
The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or a cause. The principle was articulated and made prominent by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with many antecedents, and was further used and developed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet.
The modern formulation of the principle is usually ascribed to early Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz formulated it, but was not an originator. The idea was conceived of and utilized by various philosophers who preceded him, including Anaximander, Parmenides, Archimedes, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza. One often pointed to is in Anselm of Canterbury: his phrase quia Deus nihil sine ratione facit (because God does nothing without reason) and the formulation of the ontological argument for the existence of God. A clearer connection is with the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The principle can be seen in both Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham.
Notably, the post-Kantian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer elaborated the principle, and used it as the foundation of his system. Some philosophers have associated the principle of sufficient reason with ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing). William Hamilton identified the laws of inference modus ponens with the "law of Sufficient Reason, or of Reason and Consequent" and modus tollens with its contrapositive expression.
The principle has a variety of expressions, all of which are perhaps best summarized by the following:
For every entity X, if X exists, then there is a sufficient explanation for why X exists.
For every event E, if E occurs, then there is a sufficient explanation for why E occurs.
For every proposition P, if P is true, then there is a sufficient explanation for why P is true.
A sufficient explanation may be understood either in terms of reasons or causes, for like many philosophers of the period, Leibniz did not carefully distinguish between the two.
Official source
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