Principle of Sufficient Reason

The principle that every fact, occurrence, or relation has a sufficient ground or explanation. It is associated especially with Leibniz and has been interpreted in several forms.

Leibnizian Cosmological Argument: An argument that the existence of the universe requires an explanation in a necessary being. It uses the principle to ask why there is something rather than nothing.
Leibniz's Law of Sufficient Reason: Leibniz's principle that no fact is true and no thing exists without a sufficient reason for its being so. This is the best-known formulation of the principle.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: A German philosopher and mathematician who developed a prominent formulation of the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz made the principle central to his metaphysics and theory of explanation.
Humean Skepticism: A skeptical approach associated with David Hume that questions whether reason can establish necessary connections in nature. Hume's critique challenges confidence that every event has a discoverable determining ground.
Principle of Causality: The principle that every event has a cause. Whether sufficient reason entails causation determines how far the principle reaches.
Contingency: The condition of being able to exist or not exist, or to be otherwise. The principle makes contingent facts central because they seem to call for grounds beyond themselves.
Causal Explanation: An account that explains an event by identifying its causes. Causal grounds are one familiar kind of sufficient explanation, but not the only kind.
Christian Wolff: An eighteenth-century German philosopher who systematized rationalist metaphysics. Wolff helped establish the principle as a foundational rule of philosophical reasoning.
Brute Fact: A fact that has no further explanation or ground. Brute facts directly reject the principle's demand for an explanation of every fact.
Explanatory Pluralism: The view that different kinds of phenomena require different kinds of explanation. Pluralism tests whether one universal principle can cover causal, logical, and grounding explanations.

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