 Explanation comes in many forms.  Scientific explanations typically concern the natural world, and typically proceed by citing causes of natural phenomena or subsuming them under empirical laws in some illuminating way.  Mathematical explanations typically concern the world of quantity and abstract structure, and typically proceed by proving a theorem in some illuminating way. The present entry focuses on a family of explanations widely thought to be in some sense distinctively metaphysical in character. Consider the following non-exhaustive list of putative examples, which ought to be recognizable to any metaphysician: