What is the explanatory role of ‘status-truths’ such as essence-truths, necessity-truths and law-truths? A plausible principle, suggested by various authors, is Ground by Status, according to which status truths ground their prejacents. For instance, if it is essential to a that p, then this grounds the fact that p. But Ground by Status faces a forceful objection: it is inconsistent with widely accepted principles regarding the logic of grounding (Glazier in Philos Stud 174(11):2871–2889, 2017a, Synthese 174(198):1409–1424, 2017b; Kappes in Synthese (...) 199(1–2):2575–2595, 2020, Philos Stud 178(4):1267–1284, 2021). I defend Ground by Status against this objection. (shrink)

Explanatory realism is the view that explanations work by providing information about relations of productive determination such as causation or grounding. The view has gained considerable popularity in the last decades, especially in the context of metaphysical debates about non-causal explanation. What makes the view particularly attractive is that it fits nicely with the idea that not all explanations are causal whilst avoiding an implausible pluralism about explanation. Another attractive feature of the view is that it allows explanation to be (...) a partially epistemic, context-dependent phenomenon. In spite of its attractiveness, explanatory realism has recently been subject to criticism. In particular, Taylor :197–219, 2018). has presented four types of explanation that the view allegedly cannot account for. This paper defends explanatory realism against Taylor’s challenges. We will show that Taylor’s counterexamples are either explanations that turn out to provide information about entities standing in productive determination relations or that they are not genuine explanations in the first place. (shrink)

This paper explores a novel notion of self-explanation that combines ideas from two sources: the tripartite account of explanation, according to which a proposition can help explain another either in the capacity of a reason why the latter obtains or in the capacity of an explanatory link, and the notion of an empty-base explanation, which generalizes the ideas of explanation by zero-grounding and explanation by status. After having introduced these ideas and the novel notion of self-explanation, I argue that the (...) latter has the potential to resist extant arguments against the possibility of self-explanation. In the remainder of the paper, I discuss candidates for such self-explanatory propositions and suggest possible applications for Humeanism about laws of nature, the debate on the grounds of ground, the rationalist tradition, and philosophical theology. (shrink)

A traditional account of coincidences has it that two facts are coincidental whenever they are not related as cause and effect and do not have a common cause. A recent contribution by Lando : 132–151, 2017) showed that this account is mistaken. In this paper, I argue against two alternative accounts of coincidences, one suggested by Lando, and another by Bhogal : 677–694, 2020), and defend a third one in their place. In short, I propose that how explanatory links relate (...) to non-coincidental facts in explanation is what drives a wedge between coincidences and non-coincidences. This proposal is not susceptible to the worries I raise, and is more general, since it is not restricted to coincidences and non-coincidences involving physical facts. (shrink)