Metaphysical necessity has proved a controversial concept, and criticized by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J. L. Mackie, and Richard Swinburne, among others.
For example, the philosophers of religion John Hick[2] and William L. Rowe[3] distinguished the following three: Hume's dictum is a thesis about necessary connections between distinct entities.
[4] David Lewis follows this line of thought in formulating his principle of recombination: "anything can coexist with anything else, at least provided they occupy distinct spatiotemporal positions.
An even wider application is to use Hume's dictum as an axiom of modality to determine which propositions or worlds are possible based on the notion of recombination.
[11] In Naming and Necessity,[12] Saul Kripke argued that there were a posteriori truths, such as "Hesperus is Phosphoros", or "Water is H2O", that were nonetheless metaphysically necessary.