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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant
Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in?
I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should …
Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos
Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Unity is enchanting. That is, it is an enchanting idea that although reality seems to be fragmented in various ways, this apparent fragmentation belies a fundamental unity. This dissertation is an attempt at theoretically capturing such unity via the theoretical unification of causation and grounding. And this unification supports another: the unification of reality’s causal structure and reality’s hierarchical structure.
To propose a unification of causation and grounding, I employ a common conception of grounding on which grounding is understood as a dependence relation. On this conception, if the Xs ground the Ys, then the existence of …