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.

Logical realism is a view about the metaphysical status of logic. Common to most if not all the views captured by the label ‘logical realism’ is that logical facts are mind- and language-independent. But that does not tell us anything about the nature of logical facts or about our epistemic access to them. The goal of this paper is to outline and systematize the different ways that logical realism could be entertained and to examine some of the challenges that these (...) views face. It will be suggested that logical realism is best understood as a metaphysical view about the logical structure of the world, but this raises an important question: does logical realism collapse into standard metaphysical realism? It will be argued that this result can be accommodated, even if it cannot be altogether avoided. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 44-61, March 2022.

Relationalism is the view that a quantity (i.e., space or mass) consists only of a network of concrete objects that stand in determinate relations (spatial relations or mass-relations). At its very core, the theory claims that an object possesses a determinate quantity fundamentally by standing in determinate relations in that quantity to other objects. For instance, my laptop’s mass consists fundamentally in the fact that it is k times more or less massive than other objects (my neighbor’s car, the Earth, (...) the International Prototype of the Kilogram). The view is nominalistic insofar as, according to it, facts about quantities are fundamental facts about particulars (that they are so and so related) and not about their attributes (like quantitative universals or positions in abstract state spaces). I offer here an argument against this theory, which I call “ultimate” (borrowing Bird’s (2005) term) because it shows that the very core of this theory fails to account for what it is supposed to account for: the fact that objects possess determinate quantities. I show that by merely situating objects in relation to each other, it fails to situate them anywhere really, that is, to endow them with well-determined quantities. (shrink)