Grounding

Recent metaphysical debates have increasingly shifted from questions of existence to questions of ontological priority and dependence, often articulated in terms of grounding relations. While this shift has clarified many aspects of metaphysical structure, it leaves largely unexamined a prior constraint: grounding relations presuppose individuated relata. This paper argues that individuation cannot itself be provided by grounding, since any appeal to grounding already assumes conditions under which entities count as determinate units. To make this presupposition explicit, the paper introduces a (...) structural test—the mindless-universe constraint—which requires that claims of real multiplicity remain ontologically intelligible as claims about mind-independent structure, even in the absence of epistemic agents, conceptual schemes, or representational practices. Under this constraint, a dilemma emerges. Either multiplicity fails to obtain once epistemic criteria of individuation are bracketed, or multiplicity is genuinely real and mind-independent but requires a non-epistemic principle of individuation to secure determinate relata. The paper argues that familiar strategies—appeals to structure, processes, patterns, or brute multiplicity—do not avoid this dilemma, since they either tacitly rely on epistemic criteria or presuppose individuation rather than explaining it. The central result is structural rather than doctrinal: individuation secures unity rather than multiplicity. Where multiplicity is mind-independently real, it is derivative, depending on explanatorily prior conditions that fix unity as a condition of determinacy. (shrink)

If the ground of beings cannot itself be a being, what can we say about it? This paper derives structural constraints on the trans-categorial ground using the resources of grounding theory. Aseity follows immediately: since the ground is ultimate, it cannot depend on anything external. Simplicity follows from the grounding-theoretic status of composition: wholes are grounded in their parts, so the ultimate ground can have no parts. Immutability and atemporality follow from the dependence structures that change would introduce. Other attributes (...) (uniqueness, infinity, and something approaching intellect) admit more tentative derivation. Attributes such as will, goodness, and providence cannot be derived by these means alone. The result is a partial but substantive characterization: the trans-categorial ground has determinate shape even where positive description fails. These conclusions align with classical theism's doctrine of ipsum esse subsistens, providing a grounding-theoretic rationale for traditional apophatic theology. (shrink)

Reality is composed of facts that enter into two kinds of determination or explanatory relations: grounding and causation. When one fact grounds or causes another, it determines it. It is common to think that each such determination relation is asymmetric. I shall argue for the stronger Euthyphro Principle, according to which determination itself is asymmetric. If A partly determines B—either by partly grounding it or by partly causing it—then it is not the case that B partly determines A—either by partly (...) grounding it or by partly causing it. If this is right, many philosophical views are incompatible with some intuitive claims about their subject matters. Hence, the principle has serious implications in various parts of philosophy. The paper argues for the principle and responds to putative counterexamples. (shrink)

The Key to Quantum Circuits AIM: Autonomous Intentional Masking (Nature’s Operating System) (The Unified Unitized Field) (Advanced Autonomous Agents) Frameless Frame of Reference and Motionless Computing, The Tokenization of Space, The Ontology of Information and Mind (Universally).

The truthmaker objection to presentism claims that if only present entities exist, then there can be no truthmakers for past-tense propositions. This objection has generated a wide range of presentist responses, including appeals to primitive past-tensed facts, tensed properties, traces, and abstract surrogates. Despite their diversity, these responses share a common assumption: that a truthmaker for a past-tense truth must be epistemically articulable in the present—something identifiable, specifiable, or representationally accessible. This paper demonstrates that this assumption cannot be sustained. By (...) analyzing the core commitments of truthmaker theory, I show that epistemic accessibility, relevance, and minimality constraints generate systematic category errors when imposed on truthmaking, which is properly understood as a metaphysical relation of necessitation between truths and what exists. If truthmaking is instead taken to require epistemic accessibility, relevance, or representational articulation, then it is no longer a metaphysical doctrine at all but a covert epistemology—and the truthmaker objection to presentism collapses along with it. Once these illicit constraints are eliminated, the truthmaker objection loses its force. I then apply this result to the case of presentism, arguing that the present—understood as causally constituted by the past that actually occurred—suffices as a truthmaker for past-tense propositions. This claim does not rely on the present’s representing or encoding the past, but follows from the causal structure of reality, as captured by Minkowski light cones. Furthermore, this solution reveals that truthmaking and grounding are structurally distinct relations: in the presentist case, grounding runs from past to present while truthmaking runs from present to past-truths. This opposite directionality provides direct evidence that truthmaking is not a species of grounding—a result with implications for the foundations of metaphysical dependence theory. The paper concludes that the truthmaker objection to presentism rests on constraints that cannot be coherently maintained, and that once these are removed, presentism faces no special difficulty providing truthmakers for truths about the past—while the very solution that resolves the objection demonstrates that truthmaking and grounding are not the same relation. (shrink)

``Why is there something rather than nothing?'' appears to be the ultimate explanatory demand. This paper argues that the principal strategies for answering it---parsimony, necessity, causation, and brute-fact acceptance---share a common failure: each presupposes conditions that cannot be secured independently of what the question asks us to explain. The argument applies a Jurisdiction Test: an explanatory norm applies legitimately only when its application conditions are independently available. When exported to existence as such, each norm is asked to underwrite what it (...) already presupposes. The conclusion is not that existence is inexplicable, but that explanatory norms cannot coherently be globalized. The question persists not as an unmet obligation but as a marker of where explanation overreaches. (shrink)

Contemporary physics posits a universal speed limit while simultaneously accommodating rest, variable process rates, and relativistic time dilation. This paper argues that the relevant universal constant should be understood not as a physical speed, but as a universal norm of realization, an ontological invariant governing the transfer of distinguishability. -/- Three independent arguments establish that realization requires an invariant norm: (1) variable norms introduce non-functional ontological structure incompatible with parsimony; (2) interobjective comparison and temporal ordering presuppose a common measure; (3) (...) stable objecthood, understood as closed cycles of realization, demands reparameterization-invariant circulation. -/- On this basis, motion is reinterpreted as redistribution of realization, rest as maximal internal realization, time as a derived count, and fields as stabilized derivative structures. The framework introduces no new physical postulates but clarifies the ontological conditions under which relativistic theories are possible. The main contribution is to show that the universality of the invariant norm is not a contingent physical fact but a structural necessity for any coherent ontology of objects, processes, and time. (shrink)

This paper examines what role generalised or higher-order identity can and should play in the context of essence and grounding. Emphasising important analogies to ordinary identity, I will speak of quasi-identity. While many philosophers embrace essence and grounding as primitive notions, F. Correia and A. Skiles offer an analysis in terms of identifications linking sentences and open formulas instead of singular terms. Their basic idea is to construe an essential feature as a conjunctive part and a ground as a disjunctive (...) part of the target item. This paper focuses on grounding. First, in the ingredient argument, I assume that the determinative and explanatory character of grounding comes with an inherent and non-trivial necessitating force and argue that quasi-identity is a poor candidate ingredient in an analysis of grounding, because it lacks any sign of such a force. For an alleged de dicto necessitation principle for quasi-identity is dubitable and, in any case, fails to represent an inherent necessitating force. And a de re necessitating force that might be attributed to quasi-identity blatantly fails to be non-trivial. Secondly, in the arrangement argument, I argue that grounding cannot be gained from a subtle arrangement of quasi-identity and truth-functions, because to understand when the arrangement applies and when it does not one already needs a grounding-like notion. Two constructive insights are suggested. First, grounding relations in the general sense are generated by chaining specific grounding operations, of which conjoining and disjoining are only examples. Secondly, quasi-identity is not part of a generation mechanism for grounding but serves as an important transport mechanism for grounding from transparent to opaque cases. (shrink)

Understanding the Individual and Individualism as the Fundamental Reality.

In this article, I elaborate a proposal to overcome McKenzie’s argument against the possibility of progress-talk in metaphysics (2020). McKenzie states that said discourse is not possible in metaphysics due to its “all-or-nothing” character: either metaphysical theories are true or not, without intermediaries, so the language of approximation cannot meaningfully apply to changes between metaphysical theories. I show that discussions regarding the type of metaphysical relationship between two relata are susceptible to retention and refinement, two criteria that McKenzie considers necessary (...) for progress, as long as they tend towards better matching what is observable in reality. This is possible if metaphysical relationship types are characterized as sets of properties, from which the Jaccard Index between two sets can be utilised to determine the degree of similarity or approximation between relationship types. If such is the case, then a transition from one relationship thesis to another can be considered progress as long as some properties are retained and the change is guided by empirical evidence. Hence, progress-talk in naturalized metaphysics is possible according to McKenzie’s own criteria. (shrink)

Quantum entanglement (a circle) is the hidden variable (the constant) in nature. Thus redundancy (repetition, reproduction) (fungibility) is the constant.

The notion of social construction plays an important role in many areas of social philosophy, including the philosophy of gender and sex, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of disability. Yet it is far from clear how this notion is to be understood. One promising proposal in the recent literature is that social construction may be analyzed in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. In this paper, I introduce a new problem for this ground-theoretic approach to social construction, (...) and I argue that extant ground theoretic accounts are unable to avoid this and other problems. I then propose a novel ground-theoretic account of social construction which avoids these problems. The core idea is that cases of social construction involve a distinctively social means of construction. I develop this idea using the notion of meta-ground, so that on the resulting view the distinctive feature of socially constructed facts is that their associated meta grounds include a suitable connective social fact. (shrink)

We explore the view that knowledge of grounding is based on knowledge of essence. We assess different existing accounts of the relation between essence and grounding and identify some of their shortcomings. In response, we propose a novel account that we argue is better suited to explain this relation and show how this can further explain knowledge of grounding. Finally, we examine how one can transition from knowledge of essence to knowledge of grounding. We maintain that, at least in some (...) cases, it is possible to know what grounds what—non-circularly and inferentially—on the basis of knowledge of essence. (shrink)

Many advocates of grounding believe that a proposition’s truthmaker grounds its truth—what I call the Alethic Grounding Principle. The principle was attacked by (Griffith, Inquiry 57(2):196-21, 2014), (Saenz Synthese, 2018), and (Audi, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1-24, 2019). According to Griffith, truthmaking is a species of grounding: however, something might be a proposition’s truthmaker, although its ground is not that proposition’s truthmaker. Saenz suggests that the ground of a proposition’s truth includes its truthmaker, but it includes a lot more. In (...) Audi’s view, what counts as the relation between truths and truthmakers lacks certain logical properties of the grounding relation; therefore, it does not count as grounding. I will suggest that Griffith’s and Saenz’s views imply an unnecessary inflation in ontology, as they rule out one motivation for the truthmaker theory. Furthermore, Audi’s conception of grounding is very similar to emergence. Taking some of these objections into account, I provide a revised version of the Alethic Grounding Principle, according to which the truth of a proposition is grounded in both the proposition and its truthmaker. (shrink)

I begin by showing that absolute nothingness is not only incoherent but also cannot obtain anywhere: it has no standing in logical space. Existence pervades every locus of description. There are no gaps for nothingness to “occupy”, since any alleged outside would be either something (thus already within existence), or an inadmissible “nothing” (ruled out by direct inconsistency). Boundlessness leaves no coherent outside from which a distinct creator could act (the No-Beyond result). The familiar picture of a deity dwelling in (...) a featureless “void” and then making a world fails: any state able to serve as a base for agency already has structure and so belongs within existence; there is no “beyond” from which to act. This reframes the Kalam Cosmological Argument (beginnings are rearrangements within what already exists), blocks creatio ex nihilo, and yields the central Aseity Fork: either God is Existence itself (the Spinozistic identity: Deus sive Natura), preserving aseity but foregoing a distinct, personal responder “over” the whole—or God is within existence (a personal agent/mode), allowing selective prayer response, but failing to satisfy full divine aseity by depending on the very structures it must operate through. Causal finitism doesn’t rescue a distinct first cause: a finite ladder ends in reliance on a non-identical framework—or in the agent just being the framework itself. Concepts like ipsum esse subsistens and middle knowledge also converge on the same fork. The groundwork is brief: (i) the locution “absolute nothingness exists at a region r” is self-defeating (“at” requires a locus: a site where truth-conditions can apply), asserting ∃r affirms existence, while “nothingness at r” denies any existence; and (ii) any attempt to localize, model, or subtract down to absolute nothingness inevitably smuggles in structures, rules, or domains and thereby reintroduces existence. A “structured nothing” is a being-plus-non-being hybrid and dissolves into contradiction. No logical exterior remains for nothingness to obtain. (shrink)

The fact that it is essential that p in some sense explains that p. This paper makes one negative and one positive contribution. Negatively, the paper argues that the sense of explanation is not ground, and we prove—contra Vogt—that the issue has nothing to do with whether one works with a representational or worldly notion of ground. Positively, the paper proposes an inferentialist account of essence and uses that to develop an account of essentialist explanation.

Many philosophers believe that identity facts are non-fundamental facts, facts grounded in other facts. In this paper, we discuss what might ground the identity facts for individuals and properties by examining two explanatory identity criteria. One criterion, which we call the Explanatory Leibniz’s Law, is for individuals. The other, which we call the Explanatory Intensional Criterion, is for properties. We argue that, when combined with the widely accepted claim that grounding chains do not contain loops, these two criteria give rise (...) to a contradiction. (shrink)

This Element tackles the question of how – in what way, and in virtue of what – facts about the legal properties and relations of particulars (such as their rights, duties, powers, etc.) are metaphysically explained. This question is divided into two separate issues. First, the Element focuses on the nature of the explanatory relation connecting legal facts to their metaphysical determinants. Second, it looks into the kinds of entities that figure in the explanation of legal facts. In doing so, (...) special attention is paid to the role that laws, or legal norms, play in such explanations. As it turns out, there are different ways in which legal facts might be explained, all of which have something to be said in their favor, and none of which is immune from problems. (shrink)

Limited foreknowledge open theism (LFOT) is the view that there are contingent truths about the future but that even an omniscient God cannot foreknow them. This paper mounts a three-pronged philosophical defence of this doctrine. On the one hand, I will show that it can be given a formal model and semantics that is both _formally_ and _descriptively_ adequate. In doing so, I draw heavily on the most recent advancements in Thin Red Line semantics, and ultimately recommend a framework that (...) combines familiar formal elements in a novel way: this places LFOT on a solid logical foundation. On the other hand, I will show that the two most prominent objections to LFOT, namely Todd’s (Philosophia 42(2):523–538, 2014) _grounding objection_ and Arbour's (Int J Philos Relig 73:189–207, 2013) _fatalistic objection_, can both be met. With respect to the former, we will see that the proponent of LFOT is (_pace_ Todd) able to heed a suitable grounding requirement for future contingent truths. And as regards the latter, it will be demonstrated (_pace_ Arbour) that LFOT does not entail logical fatalism. The upshot of this is that LFOT is, at least from a philosophical perspective, perfectly plausible. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel defense of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) by deriving it from the Parmenidean axiom, ex nihilo nihil fit. Its central innovation is the Equivalence Thesis, which demonstrates that synchronic brute facts instantiate the same ontological arbitrariness as diachronic creation from nothing. I argue that this equivalence reveals brute facts as violations of the Parmenidean prohibition, establishing the PSR as a necessary consequence of this more fundamental principle rather than an independent axiom. The paper develops (...) this argument through detailed engagement with contemporary defenses of brute fundamentality and challenges from grounding theory. (shrink)

In his ontology Bolzano uses the notion of grounding to make claims about the dependent and independent existence of entities. In particular, he argues that there must be a _fundamental_ object (in Bolzano’s terminology: an _unconditioned_ object) whose existence is not grounded in the existence of any other object. The argument is a philosophical gem, whether or not one endorses it in its entirety. Since the conception of grounding Bolzano works with is remarkably modern in spirit, his argument can be (...) treated and discussed like a contribution to the contemporary debate about grounding and fundamentality. This paper reconstructs Bolzano’s argument, explains its Leibnizian roots, and puts the argument under scrutiny. (shrink)

I begin by showing that absolute nothingness is not only incoherent but also cannot obtain anywhere: it has no standing in logical space. Existence pervades every locus of description. There are no gaps for nothingness to “occupy”, since any alleged outside would be either something (thus already within existence), or an inadmissible “nothing” (ruled out by direct inconsistency). Boundlessness leaves no coherent outside from which a distinct creator could act (the No-Beyond result). The familiar picture of a deity dwelling in (...) a featureless “void” and then making a world fails: any state able to serve as a base for agency already has structure and so belongs within existence; there is no “beyond” from which to act. This reframes the Kalam Cosmological Argument (beginnings are rearrangements within what already exists), blocks creatio ex nihilo, and yields the central Aseity Fork: either God is Existence itself (the Spinozistic identity: Deus sive Natura), preserving aseity but foregoing a distinct, personal responder “over” the whole—or God is within existence (a personal agent/mode), allowing selective prayer response, but failing to satisfy full divine aseity by depending on the very structures it must operate through. I then show that causal finitism doesn’t rescue a distinct first cause: it replays the central dilemma under a different route, rather than opening a third option. Concepts like ipsum esse subsistens and middle knowledge also converge on the same fork. The groundwork is brief: (i) the locution “absolute nothingness exists at a region r” is self-defeating (“at” requires a locus: a site where truth-conditions can apply), asserting ∃r affirms existence, while “nothingness at r” denies any existence; and (ii) any attempt to localize, model, or subtract down to absolute nothingness inevitably smuggles in structures, rules, or domains and thereby reintroduces existence. A “structured nothing” is a being-plus-non-being hybrid and dissolves into contradiction. No logical exterior remains for nothingness to obtain. (shrink)

This article deals with a very simple question: Can an entity (object, property, or relation) e constitute a fact p, which is more fundamental than the very fact that e exists? Some metaphysicians, based on the ‘existence precedes constituency’ dogma have been defending a negative answer for this question. My main aim in this article is to argue against this dogma. I will, firstly, show why this question is important, and then, secondly, present some plausible counterexamples, that is, cases in (...) which a given entity constitutes a fact which grounds, and so ‘is more fundamental than’, the very fact that it exists. (shrink)

Aristotle speaks of the fundamental as what is ungrounded or, in his own terminology, separate; and he also speaks of the fundamental as what grounds all else, or as what is absolutely prior. Karen Bennett notes that these two notions of fundamentality are extensionally equivalent, provided grounding is well-founded and transitive. Does Aristotle view separation and priority as extensionally equivalent? That is a difficult question to answer, in part because there are a variety of grounding relations in Aristotle, and in (...) many cases, he does not tell us enough about the relation to know if it has the requisite features of being well-founded and transitive. The chapter considers a case study in order to establish a restricted version of the equivalence claim. (shrink)

This paper discusses a recent puzzle concerning the notions of boundary parthood and dependence, and offers a new solution. The puzzle was originally presented by Jeroen Smid and successively elaborated upon by Claudio Calosi. I first reformulate some of the troublesome premises. Particularly, whereas Smid and Calosi discuss the puzzle in terms of an underspecified notion of dependence, I propose to construe it in terms of the notion of grounding. In this manner, the dependence relation inherently carries an asymmetry, and (...) we can effectively utilize its four places. The solution I advance precisely takes advantage of this feature of dependence. My proposal avoids the contradiction while still respecting the intuitions driving the original premises. It is also fully compatible with boundaries being only generically dependent on their wholes. (shrink)

Despite the tight connection between grounding and explanation, Thompson (2016) and Maurin (2019) have recently argued that explanation cannot be an epistemic guide to ground. Skiles & Trogdon (2021) disagree. Reconstructing Thompson’s and Maurin’s worry about grounding and explanation as a dilemma, they argue that one of the horns of this dilemma can be resisted, such that explanation can be an epistemic guide to ground. In this paper, I offer a different solution by showing that the other horn of the (...) respective dilemma can be resisted as well. I show that the present solution is preferable to Skiles & Trogdon’s (2021). (shrink)

We point out an important, overlooked parallel between causation and grounding. Certain cases of causation, such as trumping preemption, reveal causation to be extrinsic: what causes what can depend on what is happening in other parts of the universe. Parallel cases of grounding reveal that the same is true of grounding. This raises a number of important questions — in particular, what determines what causes what and what grounds what? We answer: these are determined by “ennoblers”, a special kind of (...) fact that serves as a second-order explanation. (shrink)

Ground physicalism is the view that higher-level properties, such as phenomenal and normative properties, are fully grounded in the fundamental physical properties. Like other non-identity physicalists, ground physicalists face the causal exclusion problem. In this paper, I introduce a new worry for the ground physicalist: the metaphysical exclusion problem. According to the metaphysical exclusion problem, there is something deeply problematic about certain properties having more than one full ground. Furthermore, the causal and metaphysical exclusion problems are shown to work together (...) to create the strengthened exclusion problem, which is significantly more difficult to resist than the causal exclusion problem alone. I then set out a solution to the strengthened exclusion problem that draws on the underexplored notion of indeterministic grounding. I conclude that the ability of indeterministic grounding to solve the strengthened exclusion problem provides us with a new reason to accept indeterministic ground physicalism. (shrink)

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while also providing a helpful framework for social theorizing. In this paper, I develop a neo-Aristotelian brand of essentialism about social kinds and show how (...) it avoids the legitimate worries of social theorists. I then argue that neo-Aristotelian social kind essentialism provides a helpful framework for a wide range of projects in social ontology and feminist metaphysics, including debunking projects, descriptive inquiries, and the project of achieving social change. I further argue that an essentialist framework is more useful than a grounding framework when it comes to certain legitimate theoretical and practical purposes in social theory. (shrink)

I argue that the thoroughly algorithmic nature of current AI systems (such as LLMs) is no obstacle to their being conscious. To this end, I present a picture on which current AI systems comprise dispositional properties which realize categorical phenomenal properties where the latter, in turn, provide the identity conditions for their dispositional realizers. This mutual ontological dependence, or, symmetrical grounding, at the heart of the proposal yields a novel picture of (AI) consciousness that avoids epiphenomenalism and is more permissive (...) regarding the specific nature/functional organization of conscious systems than has been previously suggested. This, in turn, suggests an epistemology of AI consciousness focused on investigating the high-level behaviours of AI systems rather than their low-level functional organization. (shrink)

This book investigates the idea that the sources of necessity—essence, laws, and logic—have the power to explain because they exert necessity, a modal force, on the facts. 'The Sources of Necessity' explores this idea through two interwoven themes: explanation and necessity. It develops a unified account of explanation and clarifies the distinctive explanatory contributions of each source. It examines the governing role of natural laws, the interaction between essences and logic in accounting for absolute necessity, and the existence and nature (...) of metaphysical laws. On the theme of necessity, it argues for a primitivist and pluralist view about necessity, which in turn raises two thorny questions: ‘Why are the sources of necessity themselves necessary?’ and ‘Why are different kinds of necessity ordered by strength?’ To answer these questions, the book develops a rationalist view, proposing that contingent reality emerges from a cosmogenic sequence—one that unfolds from essences and logic, through the other sources, all the way to the realm of contingent facts. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a non-standard but theoretically important notion of “veridicality”, on which perception is only veridical if it does not scramble the objective physical structure of the environment. I argue that non-veridicality in this sense is compatible with veridicality in more familiar senses, and motivate the importance of the notion. For example, I think a certain kind of realism about the scientific enterprise (that it can uncover nature’s natural structure by inference from the manifest image), assumes (...) that perception is veridical in this sense. I think the best reconstruction of Hoffman, Singh and Prakah’s “Interface Theory” is as the view that perception is non-veridical in this non-standard sense – a view that I think is reasonably understood as a kind of transcendental idealism, because it makes the objective structure of the world unknowable to us. They offer debunking arguments against perceptual veridicality (in this special sense). I respond to these arguments, and sketch a realist alternative. (shrink)

According to qualitativism, thisness is not a fundamental feature of reality; facts about particular things are metaphysically second-rate. In this paper, I advance an argument for qualitativism from ideological parsimony. Supposing that reality fundamentally contains an array of propertied things, non-qualitativists employ a distinct name (or constant) for each fundamental thing. I argue that these names encode a type of worldly structure (thisness structure) that offends against parsimony and that qualitativists can eliminate without incurring a comparable parsimony-offense.

According to anti-haecceitism, facts about particular things are modally fixed by qualitative matters. According to qualitativism, such facts are metaphysically second-rate, perhaps because grounded in qualitative matters. Qualitativism seems to imply anti-haecceitism, so objections to the latter threaten the former. The most powerful sort of apparent counterexample to anti-haecceitism, I think, consists in a pair of situations that seem the same, and qualitatively symmetric, for a stretch of time, but that differ in how that symmetry breaks. I examine this sort (...) of candidate counterexample in depth, and argue that the prospects for resisting it are heavily sensitive to broader metaphysical considerations, specifically ones about ontology, time, and causation. So, anti-haecceitism’s and qualitativism’s prospects are heavily sensitive to such considerations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make some headway in understanding the notion of zero-grounding. The account of grounding in terms of generalized identity, proposed by Correia and Skiles (2019), is employed to clarify issues of ground and zero-ground. I discuss some options for accommodating zero-grounding. According to one option, we slide dangerously close to violating the irreflexivity of ground. According to another option, zero-grounding leads to a worrying kind of overdetermination. A third option offers a way out, but (...) a challenge remains of how best to make sense of it. I further contend that these arguments broaden to concern any notion of grounding according to which groundees are “nothing over and above” their grounds. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is exploratory. It lays out some of the different options and challenges that face the grounding theorist who wants to make sense of zero-grounding. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) is impossible to separate from the rest of his system, in which nature is shown as a reflection of the idea (Idee) as presented in the logic (in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften). The system composed by logic, nature, and spirit, represents a dialectical relation in which logic as the universal, nature as the particular, and spirit as the singular, mediate through one another and develop as immanent and constitutive parts of the system as a (...) whole. Yet, the goal of the philosophy of nature is not unrelated to a philosophy of science in the contemporary sense. The latter aims to solve (among other problems) the problem of dualism between the conceptual scheme/the world and the demarcation of science (and knowledge), where the crucial difference is that the Hegelian philosophy of nature benefits from having an answer to these in the form of the absolute idea (die absolute Idee). In a contemporary sense, the constitution of these problematics would follow an abductive reasoning where the Hegelian idea (Idee) would solve these crucial problems for philosophy of science. The following paper will attempt to provide some guiding points for such a project and suggest the assumptions necessary for its development, with the sole purpose of underscoring the similarities and differences between the Hegelian philosophy of nature and a contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an often-neglected solution to the conceivability argument: the reconciliatory response. Its advocates state that, even if zombies are metaphysically possible, it does not follow that all versions of physicalism are false. To make the reconciliatory response, we must construct a theory that counts as a version of physicalism (because it makes higher-level facts count as physical) but also allows for the metaphysical possibility of zombies. Call any physicalist theory that can make the reconciliatory response (...) type-R physicalism. In this paper, I discuss one version of type-R physicalism: stochastic ground physicalism (SGP). First, I argue that type-R physicalism, construed as SGP, offers physicalists an attractive rationalist package that no other version of physicalism can provide. Second, I address two concerns that have been underexplored in the literature. First, the charge that SGP is incoherent because it fails to provide metaphysical explanations. Second, the charge that type-R physicalism is not a genuine form of physicalism because the supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical is a necessary condition for any formulation of physicalism. I argue that both concerns are ill-founded. (shrink)

The arguments in favor of the Principle of Indifference fail to explain its fruitfulness in science. Using the recent metaphysical concept of Grounding, I devise an explanation that can justify a weak version of the principle and discuss an instance of its application in Quantum mechanics.

In recent work, Christopher Peacocke has argued for a kind of realism (or anti-reductionism) about magnitudes such as temperature and spatial distance. Peacocke’s argument is that magnitudes are an ineliminable commitment of scientific and everyday explanations (including high-level explanations), and that they are the natural candidates for semantic values of our ordinary magnitude talk, and for contents of our mental states. I critique these arguments, in particular focusing on whether the realist has a satisfactory account of how high-level magnitude facts (...) are grounded in lower-level facts. I argue that a less realist (i.e., more reductionist approach) is preferable, or at least viable. I also aim to substantially clarify what is at stake in the debate. (shrink)

Presentism is the view that only presently existing things exist. Actualism is the view that only actually existing things exist. Although these views have much in common, the position we take with respect to one of them is not usually thought to constrain the position that we may take toward the other. In this paper I argue that this standard attitude deserves further scrutiny. In particular, I argue that the considerations that motivate one common objection to presentism—the grounding objection—threaten to (...) give rise to an analogous grounding objection to actualism. Those who are moved by grounding considerations to give up presentism should either be moved by analogous considerations to give up actualism as well or be prepared to undertake quite a bit of further work in order to defend their position. (shrink)

It’s often claimed that the laws of nature govern what the world is like, but it’s not clear what governing amounts to. One natural thought is to spell out the notion of governing in terms of grounding. In this paper I propose a way to do so that provides us with a fine-grained picture of governing. This fine-grained picture yields a number of benefits. First, it allows us to distinguish between different kinds of governing. In particular, it provides us with (...) the means to distinguish between constraining and producing kinds of governing. Second, it helps us assess several recent objections to characterizing governing in terms of grounding: it allows us to see that most of these objections only apply to certain kinds of governing, and that even then there are ways to mitigate these worries. Third, it allows us to assess the relative merits of different kinds of governing. And in particular, it allows us to see some reasons to prefer constraining governing over producing governing. (shrink)

Christian metaphysics advances a surprising thesis about the nature of fundamental reality: the fundamental level of reality is triune (in some sense). Certain Christian traditions maintain that there is a hierarchical structure within the trinity, and recently it has been proposed that such relations should be explicated in terms of the notion of metaphysical ground. This paper is a systematic exploration of the viability of a ground theoretic account of this conception of fundamental reality. We argue for two claims. First, (...) the only adequate ground theoretic accounts must involve laws of ground and must take them to play distinctive explanatory roles. Second, taking the laws of ground to play these distinctive explanatory roles raises a dilemma: either fundamental reality isn't triune in the way demanded by the Christian account or it makes poor predictions about the modal status of certain facts about the laws of ground. (shrink)

The persistent conflict between raw milk advocacy and public health regulation represents a classic failure of binary policy. Regulators prioritize the Precautionary Principle via thermal pasteurization to eliminate zoonotic pathogens, while advocates emphasize Nutritional Bioavailability and the "Hygiene Hypothesis." This paper introduces the Bio-Restored Dairy Protocol (BRDP) as a functionalist synthesis. By utilizing High-Temperature Short-Time (HTST) pasteurization as a "Microbial Reset," followed by a strategic "Activation Phase" involving multi-strain probiotic inoculation and controlled fermentation, the BRDP establishes a product that restores (...) enzymatic activity and probiotic density to levels equal to or exceeding raw milk. This methodology offers a definitive resolution to the "Raw Milk Debate" by providing a zero-risk safety profile without the sacrifice of biological vitality. (shrink)

Many authors have proposed that grounding is closely related to metaphysical laws. However, we argue that no existing theory of metaphysical laws is sufficiently general. In this paper, we develop a general theory of grounding laws, proposing that they are generative relations between pluralities of propositions and propositions. We develop the account in an essentialist language; this allows us to state precisely the sense in which grounding might be reduced to laws. We then put the theory to use in showing (...) how moral laws can play a role in grounding particular moral facts, in defending monism about ground, and in showing in what sense there is no gap between the grounds and the grounded. Finally, we make a novel proposal about what grounds facts about ground. (shrink)

A number of grounding-theorists hold that some truths are grounded but they are not grounded in anything. These are zero-grounded truths. Some have used the idea of zero-grounding to account for the grounds of identity truths, truths of iterated grounding, negative existentials, arithmetical truths, and necessary truths. In this paper we give two arguments to the effect that zero-grounding is an unintelligible idea, and then we show that, as should be expected with an unintelligible idea, the proposed elucidations of the (...) notion of zero-grounding fail. (shrink)

Van Inwagen argued that the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) implies necessitarianism, i.e., that all truths are necessary truths. Schnieder and Steinberg showed that van Inwagen’s argument fails if we apply a notion of plural grounding to the discussion of the PSR: the conjunction of all contingent truths is fully grounded in the plurality of all contingent truths. I argue that this manoeuvre fails if we accept a principle I call Redundancy Elimination. This principle follows naturally from the transitivity of (...) grounding and rules out that a plurality of contingent truths can fully ground the plurality of all contingent truths. Nevertheless, it is weaker than a general irreflexivity principle and compatible with basic assumptions held by van Inwagen’s opponents. I conclude that a slightly modified version of van Inwagen’s argument shows that the PSR indeed implies necessitarianism. (shrink)

This book offers a new understanding of naturalism and normativity by integrating them within a process metaphysics framework. Rejecting all forms of transcendence, Dionysis Christias advances a conception of ‘fractured immanence’ in which mind and nature are not ontologically distinct regions of being (they are both ways of being processes) yet diverge in the order of understanding, a tension enabling their ongoing self-correcting interplay as concepts without presupposing transcendence or complete mutual transparency. Drawing on Deleuze, Sellars and Peirce, the book (...) replaces substance metaphysics with an anti-representational, univocal process ontology which throws light on core problems in contemporary analytic metaphysics of powers and emergence. Normativity is embedded in this naturalistic process framework by being understood as an emergent intensive regime whose function is hyperstitional: it stabilizes and projects ideal possible worlds expressed by unactualized universals, and performatively makes them actual over time by collectively treating them as real. (shrink)

This volume, Pure Suchness Codex, Volume I: The Luminous Ground of Manifestation, undertakes a zero-degree grounding of metaphysics by taking manifestation itself—not “being,” not “subjectivity,” not “world” or “consciousness”—as the unavoidable starting point of philosophy. Rather than presupposing a subject–object structure, logical framework, or pre-given world, it asks the more primitive question: How is manifestation as such possible? -/- Through a series of transcendental reductions, the work argues that all ontological and epistemological claims already presuppose a luminous “power-to-manifest” that cannot (...) be further grounded in objects, subjects, logical laws, or any external principle. This self-grounding power is named Luminosity, and its self-present, self-sufficient mode of being is thematized as Pure Suchness. From this starting point, the volume develops a systematic account of Pure Suchness as necessarily auto-active, of its infinite potentiality, and of its intrinsic dynamical self-limitation. -/- On this basis, the book constructs a detailed transcendental dynamics: fold and release as the minimal unit of self-limitation; the co-arising of illuminating and illuminated as the first functional asymmetry; curvature (κ) as the measure of local self-limitation intensity; locus as purely relational place within a luminous topology; Breath (σ) as the minimal back-and-forth rhythm that underwrites persistence; boundary (γ) as the standing-wave pattern in which luminous flow condenses into stable form. These elements are finally gathered into the concept of the Luminous Field—the dynamically generated totality of transcendental manifestation, within which space, time, causality, matter, awareness, and cognition appear as internal articulations. -/- Volume I thus claims neither to offer a new ontology nor a new epistemology in the traditional sense, but to provide the zero-degree grounding from which both ontology and epistemology must arise. It is a systematic attempt to let philosophy begin again from the indubitable fact that “something is manifest,” and to pursue, with maximal rigor, the consequences of this fact for the structure of world, mind, and practice. (shrink)