Philosophy’s Distinctive Power: How Explanations Turn Truths Into Necessities

Philosophical explanations have a distinctive power: when they succeed, they don’t just tell us that something is true—they make it feel as though it could not have been otherwise. Elementary arithmetic is a familiar example. Once you grasp how counting works, the statement “one plus one equals two” stops looking like an interesting claim and starts looking like a necessity. The impulse behind much of philosophy is to extend that kind of clarity to deeper features of reality—to make them seem non-arbitrary, and therefore understandable.

Two early modern thinkers are often cited as giving this ambition its sharpest formulation. The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that no fact is genuinely true or real unless there is a “sufficient reason” it holds in the way it does. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza pressed a similar idea: for any thing, there must be a reason both for why it exists and for why it might not have. As contemporary philosopher Michael Della Rocca has summarised, these views express a drive to render “the world and our place in it intelligible”—a guiding promise that has animated philosophy for centuries.

Yet the demand for universal explanation can push thinkers toward radical pictures of what the world is made of. Leibniz, seeking to satisfy this standard of intelligibility, proposed that reality consists of innumerable “monads”—indivisible, point-like units of substance. Each monad, on his view, forms a self-contained realm: it does not causally interact with others, even though the whole system appears coordinated. Spinoza, following the same hunger for complete rational clarity, arrived at the opposite conclusion: rather than many basic substances, there is just one infinite substance, which he described as “God or nature.”

Today, that same philosophical insistence on explanation is helping to revive another striking thesis: panpsychism. The starting point is the everyday certainty that consciousness exists. Human beings experience pleasure and pain, perception, emotion, and thought; there is “something it is like” to be you when awake, and even when dreaming. Other animals appear to share at least some of this inner life as well. These differences matter morally. Slamming a fist onto a desk may be harmless in an ethical sense in a way that striking a conscious creature is not—because conscious beings can suffer and are candidates for moral consideration.

Common sense, then, draws a line: humans and many animals are conscious, while rocks, tables, and chairs are not. Panpsychism denies that the boundary is so clean. In its broadest form, it treats consciousness as a fundamental feature of matter itself. On that picture, the basic building blocks of the physical world—electrons and protons—carry some rudimentary form of experience, and complex systems such as dogs, people, tables, or planets possess consciousness in correspondingly richer or different degrees.

This is not presented merely as a provocation. For many proponents, panpsychism is attractive because it promises a more fully “intelligible” world—one in which consciousness does not emerge inexplicably from non-conscious matter, but is present in some form all the way down. The guiding tool in these debates is the principle of sufficient reason (PSR): the methodological commitment that, for everything, there is an adequate explanation.

In ordinary life, PSR-like reasoning is hard to avoid. Finding a bouquet of flowers on your doorstep naturally prompts you to look for a cause—perhaps a birthday, a thank-you, or congratulations. A warning light on a car dashboard is treated as a sign that something is wrong with the engine, fluids, or tyres, rather than as a brute, meaningless event. Philosophers extend that same instinct to the biggest questions: if consciousness is real, what explains it? And if we refuse to accept unexplained facts, how far must our picture of nature be revised?

The lure of a completely mystery-free account is powerful—and contentious. Even those sceptical that every mystery can or should be dissolved often see value in exploring what follows when the demand for explanation is pushed to its limit.

Why it matters

Whether consciousness is a rare biological achievement or a pervasive feature of matter reshapes debates in neuroscience, metaphysics, and ethics. Panpsychism’s resurgence reflects dissatisfaction with explanations that treat experience as an afterthought in a purely physical story. What to watch next is whether PSR-driven arguments can clarify how tiny “proto-experiences” could combine into the unified consciousness we recognise—or whether the explanatory costs outweigh the gains.