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Fundamentality
Edited by Alexander Skiles (Rutgers - New Brunswick)
About this topic
| Summary | It is commonplace for philosophers to ask whether a phenomenon of one kind is fundamental. Related questions are whether it is grounded in, or metaphysically dependent upon, or is less basic than a phenomenon of some other kind. Such claims raise a number of deep, unresolved philosophical questions in their own right. How are these notions of fundamentality related? What theoretical pursuits require them, and how can we come to know truths couched in terms of them? How do they relate to notions of mereology, modality, explanation, reduction, realization, substance, truthmaking, essence, provability, and causation? How is discourse about fundamentality to be regimented, and can well-behaved and interesting logical and semantic frameworks for this discourse be developed? What are the ontological commitments of this discourse? Must reality contain a sparsely populated ‘fundamental level’ of entities or facts? And how fundamental are these notions of fundamentality themselves? |
| Key works | Notions of fundamentality have been discussed in philosophy since its inception, and can be found discussed at length by Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bolzano, Husserl, Armstrong, Lewis, and Kim among many others. Interest in these notions has intensified during the first two decades of the 21st century largely (but not solely) due to the influence of Fine 1995, 2001, and 2012; Correia 2005; Schaffer 2003, 2009, and 2010; Rosen 2010; Sider 2009 and 2011; and Wilson 2014. |
| Introductions | For excellent introductions to recent work on metaphysical grounding see Clark & Liggins 2012, Correia & Schnieder 2012, and Trogdon 2013; for recent work on dependence in metaphysics see Correia 2008 and Koslicki 2013. |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Conceptual Analysis and A Priori Entailment (88)
- Determinates and Determinables (78)
- Emergence (694 | 461)
- Grounding (612 | 2)
- Interlevel Metaphysics, Misc (127)
- Metaphysical Levels (59 | 20)
- Physicalism (593 | 298)
- Realization (472 | 7)
- Reduction (1,022 | 238)
- Supervenience (626 | 22)
- Token Identity (122)
- Truthmakers (707)
Contents
439 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 439 |
- Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge Elements in Metaphysics).Phil Corkum - manuscriptNeo-Aristotelian metaphysics comprises the topics in contemporary metaphysics which bear similarity to the interests, commitments, positions and general approaches found in Aristotle. Despite the current interest in these topics, there is no monograph length general introduction to the methodology and themes of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics. One underdiscussed question concerns demarcation: what unifies the topics that fall under the heading of neo-Aristotelianism? Contemporary metaphysicians who might be classified as ‘neo-Aristotelians’ tend towards positions reminiscent of Aristotle’s metaphysics—such as sympathy with grounding, substance ontology, (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - The Open Systems View.Michael E. Cuffaro & Stephan Hartmann - manuscriptThere is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is described in terms of a coupling between it and a separate system which taken together are isolated. We argue against this view, and in favor of the alternative open systems view, for which systems interacting with their environment are conceived of as (...)
- Are Skeptical Doubts about Ground Warranted?Louis deRosset - manuscriptNo. More carefully: apparently not. [This piece was published in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Ground (2020), edited by Michael J. Raven with the title "Anti-Skeptical Rejoinders", pp. 180-193].
- The Fundamental Facts Can Be Logically Simple.Alexander Jackson - manuscriptI like the view that the fundamental facts are logically simple, not complex. However, some universal generalizations and negations may appear fundamental, because they cannot be explained by logically simple facts about particulars. I defend a natural reply: what explains those universal generalizations and negations is that certain facts—call them —are the fundamental facts. I argue that this solution is only available given some metaphysical frameworks, some conceptions of metaphysical explanation and fundamentality. It requires a ‘fitting’ framework, according to which (...)
- Investigating Non-philosophers’ Judgements about the Asymmetry of Metaphysical Explanation.Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - manuscriptIt is often supposed that metaphysical explanation is asymmetric: that for all x and y, if x metaphysically explains y, then y does not metaphysically explain x. Even amongst those who hold that metaphysical explanation is not asymmetric, but nonsymmetric, it is assumed that a relatively small number of particular explanations are symmetric: by and large, if x metaphysically explains y, then y does not metaphysically explain x. Both parties agree that as a matter of fact we at least typically (...)
- Modal Idealism.David Builes - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.I argue that it is metaphysically necessary that: (i) every fundamental entity is conscious, and (ii) every fundamental property is a phenomenal property.
- Eight Arguments for First-Person Realism.David Builes - forthcoming - Philosophy Compass.According to First-Person Realism, one's own first-person perspective on the world is metaphysically privileged in some way. After clarifying First-Person Realism by reference to parallel debates in the metaphysics of modality and time, I survey eight different arguments in favor of First-Person Realism.
- No foundations for metaphysical coherentism.Ralf Busse - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-32.Recently, metaphysical coherentism has been propounded as an alternative to metaphysical foundationalism and infinitism. The view replaces the picture of reality as a hierarchy of levels with that of a network of objects or facts standing in symmetric or, more generally, cyclic relations of metaphysical dependence. This paper defends the orthodox picture of a well-founded hierarchy against the claimed superiority of coherentism. First, it will be argued that alleged theoretical advantages of coherentism do not hold up to scrutiny. Secondly, examples (...)
- What is priority monism? Reply to Kovacs.Damiano Costa - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the basic concrete entity on which each of its parts depend. Kovacs has recently argued that none of the classical notions of dependence could be used to spell out priority monism. I argue that four notions of dependence – namely rigid existential dependence, generic existential dependence, explanatory dependence, and generalised explanatory dependence – can indeed be used to spell out priority monism, and specify the conditions under which this is possible.
- Aristotelian universals, strong immanence, and construction.Damiano Costa & Alessandro Giordani - forthcoming - Synthese.The Aristotelian view of universals, according to which each universal generically depends for its existence on its instantiations, has recently come under attack by a series of ground-theoretic arguments. The last such arguments, presented by Raven (2022), promises to offer several significant improvements over its predecessors, such as avoiding commitment to the transitivity of ground and offering new reasons for the metaphysical priority of universals over their instantiations. In this paper, we argue that Raven's argument does not effectively avoid said (...)
- Joints and Basic Ways.Christopher Frugé - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Metaphysicians often distinguish between joints and basic ways. Joints are the unified and joint-carving properties that trace the structure of the world. They are theorized under the ideology of structural, perfectly natural, or sparse properties. Basic ways are the ultimate and independent properties that give rise to all others. They are theorized under the ideology of grounding, where the ungrounded properties are the basic ways. While these notions are often seen as rivals, I argue that we need both, because the (...)
- On the Necessity of Priority Monism.Stephen Harrop - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.Priority monism is the doctrine that there is only one basic object: the entire cosmos. Priority monists often take this to be a metaphysically necessary thesis. I explore the consequences of modalizing the priority monist thesis. I argue that, modulo some assumptions, the modalized thesis entails the necessary existence of the actual cosmos. I further argue that, if the modalized thesis is true, and the actual cosmos necessarily exists, then the only possible concrete objects are the actually existing ones.
- Modality and Essence in Contemporary Metaphysics.Kathrin Koslicki - forthcoming - In Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A Conceptual History. Oxford, UK:Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have natures, essences, or essential features independently of how these entities are described, conceptualized or otherwise placed with respect to our specifically human interests, purposes or activities. Modalists about essence, on the one hand, take the position that the essential truths are a subset of the necessary truths and the essential properties of entities are included among their necessary properties. Non-modalists about essence, on the other (...)
- Ontology without hierarchy.Kristie Miller, Michael J. Duncan & James Norton - forthcoming - In Javier Cumpa (ed.), The Question of Ontology: The Contemporary Debate. Oxford University Press.It has recently become popular to suggest that questions of ontology ought be settled by determining, first, which fundamental things exist, and second, which derivative things depend on, or are grounded by, those fundamental things. This methodology typically leads to a hierarchical view of ontology according to which there are chains of entities, each dependent on the next, all the way down to a fundamental base. In this paper we defend an alternative ontological picture according to which there is no (...)
- Derivative Indeterminacy.Kevin Richardson - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.Indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) if it has its source in the way the world is (rather than how it is represented or known). There are two questions we could ask about indeterminacy. First: does it exist? Second: is indeterminacy derivative? I focus on the second question. Specifically, I argue that (at least some) metaphysical indeterminacy can be derivative, where this roughly means that facts about indeterminacy are metaphysically grounded in facts about what is determinate.
- Physicalism, Foundationalism, and Infinite Descent.Jonas Werner - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-6.This paper contributes to answering the question how physicalism can be defined for a world without fundamental physical phenomena. In a recent paper in this journal, Torin Alter, Sam Coleman, and Robert J. Howell propose a necessary condition on physicalism. They argue that physicalism is true only if there is no infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena. I argue that this alleged necessary condition faces counterexamples. An infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena is compatible with physicalism. Afterwards I (...)
- A Defence of Ontological Innocence: Response to Barker.Jonas Werner - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.In a recent paper in this journal, Jonathan Barker argues against the claim that grounded entities are ontologically innocent. In this paper I defend the ontological innocence of grounded entities against Barker's argument. I tease out an assumption that is crucial for the success of Barker's argument and I show that the defender of ontological innocence can deny this assumption in a motivated way.
- Fundamentality and Levels in Everettian Quantum Mechanics.Alastair Wilson - forthcoming - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality. Springer.Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...)
- Against Purity.Jonathan Barker - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity is the thesis that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional is accepted by virtually all of Purity’s defenders. However, I argue that it is also the (...)
- Can We have Justified Beliefs about Fundamental Properties?Darren Bradley - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):46-67.An attractive picture of the world is that some features are metaphysically fundamental and others are derivative, with the derivative features grounded in the fundamental features. But how do we have justified beliefs about which features are fundamental? What is the epistemology of fundamentality? I sketch a response in this paper. The guiding idea is that the same properties cause the same experiences. I argue that a probabilistic connection between epistemic fundamentality and metaphysical fundamentality is sufficient for justified beliefs about (...)
- The Explanatory Power of Deflationary Truth.Darren Bradley - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3439-3456.It is widely believed that deflationary truth has no explanatory power. I will argue that it does. Specifically, I will consider some objections to deflationary truth having explanatory power, and argue that they fail. The position which will emerge is that the deflationary concept of truth is analogous to the concept of an average. Scientists take averages to be explanatory, and I will argue that the concept of deflationary truth is explanatory in the same way. I then argue that this (...)
- Metaphysical Foundationalism and Theoretical Unification.Andrew Brenner - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1661-1681.Some facts ground other facts. Some fact is fundamental iff there are no other facts which partially or fully ground that fact. According to metaphysical foundationalism, every non-fundamental fact is fully grounded by some fundamental fact(s). In this paper I examine and defend some neglected considerations which might be made in favor of metaphysical foundationalism. Building off of work by Ross Cameron, I suggest that foundationalist theories are more unified than, and so in one important respect simpler than, non-foundationalist theories, (...)
- Aristotle on Artifactual Substances.Phil Corkum - 2023 - Metaphysics 6 (1):24-36.It is standardly held that Aristotle denies that artifacts are substances. There is no consensus on why this is so, and proposals include taking artifacts to lack autonomy, to be merely accidental unities, and to be impermanent. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle holds that artifacts are substances. However, where natural substances are absolutely fundamental, artifacts are merely relatively fundamental—like any substance, an artifact can ground such nonsubstances as its qualities; but artifacts are themselves partly grounded in natural substances. (...)$29.43 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (5 more)Export citation Bookmark
- A New Argument for the Groundedness of Grounding Facts.Fabrice Correia - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1577-1592.Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about “derivative entities”—e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences ‘the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete’ and ‘the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p’, where ‘p’ is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics—must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on (...)
- The regress argument against realism about structure.Javier Cumpa - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5):726-737.Is structure a fundamental and indispensable part of the world? Is the question of ontology a question about structure? Structure is a central notion in contemporary metaphysics [Sider 2011. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Clarendon Press]. Realism about structure claims that the question of ontology is about the fundamental and indispensable structure of the world. In this paper, I present a criticism of the metaphysics of realism about structure based on a version of Russell’s famous regress argument against (...)
- Fundamental Things: Theory and Applications of Grounding.Louis deRosset - 2023 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a view on which things are organized into layers, with phenomena in higher layers dependent on and determined by what goes on below. Philosophers have recently explored the idea that we can make sense of this idea by appeal to a relation called grounding. This book develops the rudiments of a theory of grounding, and applies that theory to questions of independent interest. The theorizing consists in saying in more detail (...)
- Seek the Joints! Avoid the Gruesome! Fidelity as an Epistemic Value.Peter Finocchiaro - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):393-409.A belief is valuable when it “gets it right”. This “getting it right” is often understood solely as a matter of truth. But there is a second sense of “getting it right” worth exploring. According to this second sense, a belief “gets it right” when its concepts accurately match the way the world is objectively organized – that is, when its concepts are joint-carving, or have fidelity. In this paper, I explore the relationship between fidelity and epistemic value. While many (...)
- Janus-Faced Grounding.Christopher Frugé - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.A common view in the metaphysics of ground is that all grounding facts are grounded. This generates an infinite regress of ever more grounding of grounding facts, but most grounding theorists take the regress to be harmless. However, in this paper, I argue that the regress is in fact vicious, therefore some grounding facts are ungrounded. Since the regress appears to fall out of two plausible principles of fundamentality, I offer a new interpretation of them that allows for ungrounded grounding (...)
- Metaphysical foundationalism, heterarchical structure, and Huayan interdependence.Nicholaos Jones - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2).Standard views about metaphysical structure presume that if metaphysical structure is hierarchical, any priority ordering of individuals is rigid or situationally invariant. This paper challenges this presumption. The challenge derives from an effort to interpret the kind of metaphysical structure implicit in writings central to the Huayan tradition of Chinese Buddhism. The Huayan tradition views reality as a realm of thoroughgoing interdependence. Close attention to primary sources indicates that this view does not fit comfortably in any of the metaphysical structures (...)
- Against Representational Levels.Nicholas K. Jones - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):140-157.Some views articulate reality's hierarchical structure using relations from the fundamental to representations of reality. Other views instead use relations from the fundamental to constituents of non-representational reality. This paper argues against the first kind of view.
- Empty-Base Explanation.Yannic Kappes - 2023 - De Gruyter.This book develops and applies a novel kind of explanation: Empty-Base Explanation. While ordinary explanations have a tripartite structure involving an explanandum, a base of reasons why the explanandum obtains, and a link that connects the reasons to the explanandum, this book argues that there are explanations whose corresponding set of reasons is empty. This novel idea is located in the theoretical background of several fundamental philosophical issues. For example, it provides a convincing kind of ultimate or final explanation that (...)
- Grounding identity in existence facts: A reply to Wilhelm.Neil Mehta - 2023 - Analysis 83 (3):500-506.What grounds facts of the form? One promising answer is: facts of the form. A different promising answer is: x itself. Isaac Wilhelm has recently argued that the second answer is superior to the first. In this paper, I rebut his argument.
- Logical Realism and the Riddle of Redundancy.Óscar Antonio Monroy Pérez - 2023 - Mind 131 (524):1083-1107.According to an influential view, when it comes to representing reality, some words are better suited for the job than others. This is elitism. There is reason to believe that the set of the best, or elite, words should not be redundant or arbitrary. However, we are often forced to choose between these two theoretical vices, especially in cases involving theories that seem to be mere notational variants. This is the riddle of redundancy: both redundancy and arbitrariness are vicious, but (...)
- Grounding Physicalism and "Moorean" Connections.Alex Moran - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
- The Metaphysics of gender is (Relatively) substantial.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):192-207.According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...)
- Critical social ontology.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...)
- Fundamentality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.The notion of fundamentality, as it is used in metaphysics, aims to capture the idea that there is something basic or primitive in the world. This metaphysical notion is related to the vernacular use of “fundamental”, but philosophers have also put forward various technical definitions of the notion. Among the most influential of these is the definition of absolute fundamentality in terms of ontological independence or ungroundedness. Accordingly, the notion of fundamentality is often associated with these two other technical notions.
- Becoming 'Realistic' about Reality.Ilexa Yardley - 2023 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.Conservation of the Circle is the only dynamic in Nature. Forget about physics, philosophy, psychology, technology, biology, finance, politics, and the media (the concrete abstraction) (the constant variable). Language cannot provide anywhere near a 'complete' articulation (understanding) of (what humans experience as) 'Reality.'.
- Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy.Valia Allori (ed.) - 2022 - Cham: Springer.This edited collection provides new perspectives on some metaphysical questions arising in quantum mechanics. These questions have been long-standing and are of continued interest to researchers and graduate students working in physics, philosophy of physics and metaphysics. It features contributions from a diverse set of researchers, ranging from senior scholars to junior academics, working in varied fields, from physics to philosophy of physics and metaphysics. The contributors reflect on issues about fundamentality (is quantum theory fundamental? If so, what is its (...)
- Composing Spacetime.Sam Baron & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (1):33-54.According to a number of approaches in theoretical physics, spacetime does not exist fundamentally. Rather, spacetime exists by depending on another, more fundamental, non-spatiotemporal structure. A prevalent opinion in the literature is that this dependence should not be analyzed in terms of composition. We should not say, that is, that spacetime depends on an ontology of non-spatiotemporal entities in virtue of having them as parts. But is that really right? On the contrary, we argue that a mereological approach to dependent (...)
- The harmony of grounding.Sam Baron, Kristie Miller & Jonathan Tallant - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3421-3446.Mereological harmony is the idea that the mereological structure of objects mirrors the mereological structure of locations. Grounding harmony is the idea that there is a similar mirroring between the grounding structure of objects and locations. Our goal in this paper is exploratory: we introduce and then explore two notions of grounding harmony: locative and structural. We outline potential locative and structural harmony principles for grounding, and show which of these principles may entail, or be entailed by, principles of mereological (...)
- Emergence in context: a treatise in twenty-first century natural philosophy.Robert C. Bishop - 2022 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Edited by Michael Silberstein & Mark Pexton.Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how novel things emerge. How can order come out of disorder? This book introduces a new account, contextual emergence, seeking to answer such questions."--Back cover.
- Symmetric relations, symmetric theories, and Pythagrapheanism.Tim Button - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.It is a metaphysical orthodoxy that interesting non-symmetric relations cannot be reduced to symmetric ones. This orthodoxy is wrong. I show this by exploring the expressive power of symmetric theories, i.e. theories which use only symmetric predicates. Such theories are powerful enough to raise the possibility of Pythagrapheanism, i.e. the possibility that the world is just a vast, unlabelled, undirected graph.
- The Unity of Dependence.Jack Casey - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2):1-18.Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence's unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years (...)
- Metafísica para Juristas.Samuele Chilovi - 2022 - In D. Lagier & G. Lariguet (eds.), Filosofía. Una Introducción para Juristas. Madrid: Trotta.
- The Explanatory Demands of Grounding in Law.Samuele Chilovi & George Pavlakos - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):900-933.A new strategy in philosophy of law appeals to explanatory gap arguments to attack legal positivism. We argue that the strategy faces a dilemma, which derives from there being two available readings of the constraint it places on legal grounding. To this end, we elaborate the most promising ways of spelling out the epistemic constraints governing law-determination, and show that each of the arguments based on them has problems. Throughout the paper, we evaluate a number of explanatory requirements, ultimately with (...)
- Essence, Triviality, and Fundamentality.Ashley Coates - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):502-516.I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence, and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory provides a promising way forward for attempts to produce an adequate nonprimitivist, modalist account of essence. As both triviality and fundamentality in the account are (...)
- Brutalist fundamentalism: radical and moderate.Joaquim Giannotti - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-19.In contemporary metaphysics, the doctrine that the fundamental facts are those which are wholly ungrounded is the received view or something near enough. Against this radical brutalism, several metaphysicians argued in favour of the existence of fundamental facts that are moderately brute or merely partially grounded. However, the arguments for moderately brute facts rely on controversial metaphysical scenarios. This paper aims to counteract the tendency in favour of radical brutalism on scientific grounds. It does so by showing that naturalistic metaphysicians (...)
- The Fundamentality and Non-Fundamentality of Ontological Categories.Jani Hakkarainen - 2022 - In Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), E.J. Lowe and Ontology. Routledge. pp. 123–142.In this paper, I propose a solution to an almost ignored problem in metaphysics and metametaphysics: what is categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality? My proposal builds on E. J. Lowe’s view on the issue. By means of the newcomer notion of generic identity, I can give an account of something that Lowe did not explicate: the constitution of formal ontolog- ical relations. Formal ontological relations (e.g. instantiation) are internal relations that deter- mine ontological form and category-membership. I argue that categorial fundamentality (...)
- Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality.Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.) - 2022 - Springer.This book offers a unique perspective on one of the deepest questions about the world we live in: is reality multi-leveled, or can everything be reduced to some fundamental ‘flat’ level? This deep philosophical issue has widespread implications in philosophy, since it is fundamental to how we understand the world and the basic entities in it. Both the notion of ‘levels’ within science and their ontological implications are issues that are underexplored in the philosophical literature. The volume reconsiders the view (...)
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