Philosophy Commons^™

Powers And The Metaphysics Of Fundamentality, Benjamin Cook

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, I address the question of whether ground, the relation that obtains between entities e1...en and a further entity e when e ontologically depends on, and is metaphysically explained by, e1...en, should be understood causally and, if so, whether this has any substantive implications. I answer both in the affirmative. I argue that ground and causation are similar enough to motivate characterizing ground as a special kind of causation, and that this can be done if we adopt a powers-theoretic account of causation. Moreover, I argue that the resultant view of ground, what I call “powerful, existential causation,” …

Metaphysical Coherentism, Jan Swiderski

Dissertations - ALL

I defend metaphysical coherentism, according to which reality is an interdependent network, system, or web, held together by a relation philosophers call "metaphysical explanation" or "grounding". If coherentism is true, nothing is ungrounded, things ground each other, and understanding what it is to be any given thing – a tree, a house, or a person – is grasping how it fits in: how it grounds and is grounded by its environment.

Coherentism is inconsistent with a widely-accepted, orthodox view of grounding, according to which certain fundamental facts about reality asymmetrically determine everything else. In Chapter 1, I argue that this …