The Contingency of Empirical Reality

Abstract

Empirical reality is partly constituted by the infinity of possible worlds, one of which is the actual world, the subsistence of subjects of experience, and the mutual ontological and epistemological fit between subjects and objects of experience. In this chapter, I bracket the term ‘God’ and argue that, based on the account of empirical reality developed so far, we can conclude that there is a transcendent ground of the subsistence of the soul and of the being of the infinity of possible worlds, one of which is the actual world. The reason is that the being of each of the latter itself is radically contingent and leaves us with two options only: either it is a primitive and unaccountable fact that they exist or there is a sufficient ground of their being. Since the first assumption is unintelligible, it follows that there is a ground of the being of empirical reality. Once this is shown, I argue that the ground of the being of empirical reality, together with the category of world-receptive and the category of world-constitutive particulars, constitutes what I refer to as the totality of empirical reality.