In accounting for the objects and properties of the manifest world, issues include the fundamentality, causal efficacy and ontological robustness of the dispositional versus the non-dispositional. Concerning fundamentality, the available options seem to be that: dispositional and categorical properties are different kinds, both fundamental; dispositional and categorical properties are one and the same, and fundamental; only categorical properties are fundamental while dispositional properties, if they exist, are higher-order; and only dispositional properties are fundamental while categorical properties, if they exist, are (...) higher-order. The viability of option, a pure-power ontology, has met detracting arguments from several quarters. This paper outlines why the fourth option appears nonetheless attractive and provides a defence for its credibility by suggesting how the manifestly qualitative world can be explained without recourse to fundamental categorical properties. (shrink)

Conceptual consequences of recent results in loop quantum gravity are collected and discussed here in view of their implications for a modern philosophy of science which is mainly understood as one that totalizes scientific insight so as to eventually achieve a consistent model of what may be called fundamental heuristics on an onto-epistemic background which is part of recently proposed transcendental materialism. This enterprise is being understood as a serious attempt of answering recent appeals to philosophy so as to provide (...) a conceptual foundation for what is going on in modern physics, and of bridging the obvious gap between physics and philosophy. This present first part of the paper deals with foundational aspects of this enterprise, a second part will deal with its holistic aspects. (shrink)