It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation— ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work in illuminating metaphysical dependence. I argue that Grounding is also unsuited to do this work. To start, Grounding alone cannot do this work, for bare claims of Grounding leave open such basic questions as whether (...) Grounded goings-on exist, whether they are reducible to or rather distinct from Grounding goings-on, whether they are efficacious, and so on; but in the absence of answers to such basic questions, we are not in position to assess the associated claim or theses concerning metaphysical dependence. There is no avoiding appeal to the specific metaphysical relations typically at issue in investigations into dependence—for example, type or token identity, functional realization, classical mereological parthood, the set membership relation, the proper subset relation, the determinable/determinate relation, and so on—which are capable of answering these questions. But, I argue, once the specific relations are on the scene, there is no need for Grounding. (shrink)

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 819-821, October 2013.

review of Laden's *Reasoning: a social picture* praising the aim and expressing puzzlement at the details,.

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThis is a very good, very helpful book. In describing two possible outgrowths of contemporary physicalism, Pereboom performs a feat of time‐travel: he takes us forward to see the fruits ultimately to be produced by current seeds of thought. One of these branches—based on the ‘qualitative inaccuracy’ thesis—almost represents a parody of prevailing physicalist epistemic treatments of consciousness, to the extent that I can't shake the feeling that the book's first half may be (...) written with tongue in cheek. The second—to my mind far more sensible—view bears close relation to a Russellian neutral monism. Thus the time‐travel goes back as well as forward. The ‘qualitative inaccuracy’ view, too, has foreshadows in some early suggested treatments of the grain problem. The book's third strand... (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyProfessor Haldane's collection of essays covers not only topics of Philosophy of Religion, but issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. They are treated not so much from a particular religious viewpoint, or from a philosophical tradition associated with religious principles, but by using materials inspired by such viewpoints and traditions. Haldane is explicitly combating an influential strand of thought in academic philosophy which would exclude such materials in principle, even while the (...) discipline increases its openness to inspirations from external sources such literature, social history, and neuroscience, and while the philosophy of the English‐speaking world has an increasingly open‐minded attitude to alternative methodologies and traditions, such as continental philosophy. What results is a set of intriguing philosophical explorations, mostly focused on the views of a particular philosopher,... (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyHerman Philipse sets out in this book an extremely detailed and thorough case for dismissing the claims of natural theology in the age of science. His main strategy is to refute the arguments of Richard Swinburne, claiming that Swinburne presents the strongest case for natural theology in a scientific age; hence if Swinburne fails, natural theology generally is discredited. Whether or not the broader conclusion is warranted, that we should all become atheists, the (...) wide‐ranging and detailed arguments and analyses should serve as useful material for teaching and debate.The structure of the book is commendably straightforward. The first part deals with the primacy and rationality of natural theology. The second part investigates the extent to which theism can be treated as a theory in the manner of scientific theories and how well it performs in this capacity, with Philipse concluding that... (shrink)

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 832-835, October 2013.

There has been much recent interest in a distinctively metaphysical kind of determinative explanation: ground. This paper concerns various skeptical challenges to ground’s relevance to metaphysics, such as that it is an empty posit, that the work it is supposed to do is appropriated by other notions, and that it is inapt for specific issues it should serve. I argue against these challenges. My strategy is both critical and constructive. Critical because I argue that versions of these challenges raised by (...) Elizabeth Barnes, Kathrin Koslicki, Mari Mikkola, and Jessica Wilson are not persuasive. Constructive because we may nevertheless learn from them new work for ground. (shrink)

Kit Fine; XIV*—Ontological Dependence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...) I all wanting to be modalists, but disagreeing on the details. As such, while my primary aim is to show what’s wrong with this trio, the secondary aim is demonstrating how what’s right about them in fact pushes one towards my own sparse modalist account. So while the primary conclusion of this paper is negative, the secondary, positive, conclusion is that modalists shouldn’t give up hope – plausible responses to Fine are still out there. (shrink)

After many years of enduring the drought and famine of Quinean ontology and Carnapian meta-ontology, the notion of ground, with its distinctively philosophical flavor, finally promises to give metaphysicians something they can believe in again and around which they can rally: their very own metaphysical explanatory connection which apparently cannot be reduced to, or analyzed in terms of, other familiar idioms such as identity, modality, parthood, supervenience, realization, causation or counterfactual dependence. Often, phenomena such as the following are cited as (...) putative examples of grounding connections: systematic connections between entire realms of facts (mental/physical; moral/natural; etc.); truthmaking (e.g., the relation between the truth of the proposition that snow is white and snow’s being white); logical cases (e.g., the connection between conjunctive facts or disjunctive facts and their constituent facts); the determinate/determinable relation (e.g., the relation between something’s being maroon and its being red). I argue in this paper that classifying all of these phenomena as exhibiting grounding connections does not achieve much in the way of illumination. In fact, by treating a collection of phenomena which is in fact heterogeneous as though it were homogeneous, we have, if anything, taken a dialectical step backward. (shrink)

Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by (...) Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations. (shrink)

I propose formulating identity criteria as generic statements of ground, thereby avoiding objections that have been made to the more usual formulations.

In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...) properties. (shrink)

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., the essentialist construals) focus on conditions that (...) must be satisfied in order for an entity to be the very entity it is at each time at which it exists; some are rigid, in the sense that they concern a relation between particular entities; others are generic, in the sense that they involve only a relation between an entity and some entities or other, which bear certain characteristics. I identify three potential measures of success with respect to which these different definitions of ontological dependence can be evaluated and consider the question of how well they in fact meet these desiderata. I end by noting that certain challenges face even the most promising essentialist construals of ontological dependence. (shrink)

A significant reorientation is currently under way in analytic metaphysics, away from an almost exclusive focus on questions of existence and towards a greater concentration on questions concerning the dependence of one type of phenomenon on another. Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its inception, interest in a systematic study of this concept has only recently surged among contemporary metaphysicians. In this paper, I focus on a promising account of ontological dependence in terms of a (...) non-modal and sufficiently constrained conception of essence developed by Kit Fine. I argue that even this essentialist account is, as it stands, not fine-grained enough to recognize different varieties of dependence which ought to be distinguished even within the realm of ontology. In some cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on its essential constituents out of which it is constructed; but in other cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on another for a different reason. A framework which glosses over these differences does not offer a proper diagnosis of why one entity ontologically depends on another. (shrink)

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...) physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently become receptive to the idea that, in addition to scientific or causal explanation, there may be a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation, in which explanans and explanandum are connected, not through some sort of causal mechanism, but through some constitutive form of determination. I myself have long been sympathetic to this idea of constitutive determination or ‘ontological ground’; and it is the aim of the present paper to help put the idea on a firmer (...) footing - to explain how it is to be understood, how it relates to other ideas, and how it might be of use in philosophy. (shrink)

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter‐examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are ‘fundamentally misguided’. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter‐examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness (...) restriction, I proceed to show how the resulting sparse modalism circumvents Fine's original counter‐examples. After dismissing a potential problem concerning the membership relation, I conclude that, as at least one form of modalism is viable, the project of understanding essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is not so fundamentally misguided after all. (shrink)

I lay down a system of structural rules for various notions of ground and establish soundness and completeness.

It is common to think of essence along modal lines: the essential truths, on this approach, are a subset of the necessary truths. But Aristotle conceives of the necessary truths as being distinct and derivative from the essential truths. Such a non-modal conception of essence also constitutes a central component of the neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics defended over the last several decades by Kit Fine. Both Aristotle and Fine rely on a distinction between what belongs to the essence proper of (...) an object and what merely follows from the essence proper of an object. In order for this type of approach to essence and modality to be successful, we must be able to identify an appropriate consequence relation which in fact generates the result that the necessary truths about objects follow from the essential truths. I discuss some proposals put forward by Fine and then turn to Aristotle’s account: Aristotle’s central idea, to trace the explanatory power of definitions to the causal power of essences has the potential to open the door to a philosophically satisfying response to the question of why certain things are relevant, while others are irrelevant, to the nature or essence of entities. If at all possible, it would be desirable for example to have something further to say by way of explanation to such questions as ‘Why is the number 2 completely irrelevant to the nature of camels?’. (shrink)

The epistemology of essence is a topic that has received relatively little attention, although there are signs that this is changing. The lack of literature engaging directly with the topic is probably partly due to the mystery surrounding the notion of essence itself, and partly due to the sheer difficulty of developing a plausible epistemology. The need for such an account is clear especially for those, like E.J. Lowe, who are committed to a broadly Aristotelian conception of essence, whereby essence (...) plays an important theoretical role. In this chapter, our epistemic access to essence is examined in terms of the a posteriori vs. a priori distinction. The two main accounts to be contrasted are those of David S. Oderberg and E.J. Lowe. (shrink)

I describe some paradoxes of ground and relate them to the semantic paradoxes.

Contents: Preface VII; Introduction 1; 1. The General Framework 5; 2. Some Standard Systems 61; 3. Systems in General 147; 4. Non-Standard Systems 177; Bibliography 210; General Index 215; Index of Symbols 219-220.

It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in (...) modal terms or even to be regarded as extensionally equivalent to a modal notion. The one notion is, if I am right, a highly refined version of the other; it is like a sieve which performs a similar function but with a much finer mesh. (shrink)

Some argue, following Bertrand Russell, that because general truths are not entailed by particular truths, general facts must be posited to exist in addition to particular facts. I argue on the contrary that because general truths (globally) supervene on particular truths, general facts are not needed in addition to particular facts; indeed, if one accepts the Humean denial of necessary connections between distinct existents, one can further conclude that there are no general facts. When entailment and supervenience do not coincide (...) it is only failure of supervenience, not failure of entailment, that carries ontological import. (shrink)

Some recently-proposed counterexamples to the traditional definition of essential property do not require a separate logic of essence. Instead, the examples can be analysed in terms of the logic and theory of abstract objects. This theory distinguishes between abstract and ordinary objects, and provides a general analysis of the essential properties of both kinds of object. The claim ‘x has F necessarily’ becomes ambiguous in the case of abstract objects, and in the case of ordinary objects there are various ways (...) to make the definition of ‘F is essential to x’ more fine-grained. Consequently, the traditional definition of essential property for abstract objects in terms of modal notions is not correct, and for ordinary objects the relationship between essential properties and modality, once properly understood, addresses the counterexample. (shrink)

The distinction between the essential and the accidental characteristics of a thing should be understood not in modal terms (the received view) nor in definitional terms (Fine’s recent proposal) but as follows: an essential characteristic of a thing is one that is not explained by any other of that thing’s characteristics, and an accidental characteristic of a thing is one that is so explained. Various versions of this proposal can be formulated.

This paper distinguishes two kinds of realist issue -- the issue of whether the propositions of a given domain are factual and the issue of whether they are fundamental. It criticizes previous accounts of what these issues come to and suggests that they are to be understood in terms of a basic metaphysical concept of reality. This leaves open the question of how such issues are to be resolved; and it is argued that this may be done through consideration of (...) what grounds the facts of a given domain, when fundamentality is in question, and what grounds our engagement with the putative facts, when factuality is in question. (shrink)

In Fine 1994, Kit Fine challenges the view that the notion of essence is to be understood in terms of the metaphysical modalities, and he argues that it is not essence which reduces to metaphysical modality, but rather metaphysical modality which reduces to essence. In this paper I put forward a modal account of essence and argue that it is immune from Fine’s objections. The account presupposes a non‐standard, independently motivated conception of the metaphysical modalities which I dub Priorean. Arthur (...) Prior never endorsed that very conception, but in some respects his own views on the topic are so close to it, and different from all currently accepted views, that the label ‘Priorean’ is perfectly appropriate. (shrink)

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 809-811, October 2013.

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 837-839, October 2013.

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyExperimental results on the variability and intra‐personal instability of philosophical intuitions have recently sparked a lively methodological debate about the reliability of the philosophical method. In his new book, Herman Cappelen argues that this entire debate is misguided. The reason is simple: philosophers don't rely on intuitions, so there is no reason for philosophers to worry about their reliability. Cappelen's case for this claim amounts to one of the most original and well‐argued contributions (...) to recent discussions about philosophical methodology. His book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the debate.Cappelen's book is in two parts, both centred on a claim he refers to as Centrality: ‘Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories’. The first part rejects an argument attempting to support Centrality with reference to... (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyAmong Kleingeld's most striking conclusions in this excellent book is that Kant ‘changed his mind’ in relation to several aspects of his cosmopolitan thinking. In current philosophical circles, one revises one's earlier position, concedes a point here and adds a qualifying amendment there, all the while seeking to maintain an impression of steady continuity in thought and unfaltering consistency in argument between earlier and later versions of one's philosophical self. One certainly does not (...) simply change one's mind. Yet according to Kleingeld, Kant changed his mind on the desirability of a world state, on the beneficial effects of war upon peace, on the idea of a cosmopolitan community and, perhaps most importantly, on the question of race. The most enduringly debated of these is Kant's – arguably permanently unsettled – view on the question, ‘free league or coercive federation?’ at... (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyScott Davidson and Diane Perpich set high standards for the assessment of this volume. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Levinas's Totality and Infinity is going through a ‘midlife crisis’. Scholarship on Levinas ‘sometimes seems to do little more than plow familiar terrain, remaining stuck in the rut of well‐worn interpretations and overused phrases’. One response to a midlife crisis is to exchange one's established partner for a younger model. But the editors (...) do not recommend this solution to the ‘dull routine’ into which our relationship with Levinas has fallen. They believe that the essays they have collected will pep up our relationship with him by venturing ‘along unexplored pathways’. Other thinkers are introduced into the ménage – Karl Marx, Stanley Cavell... (shrink)

Kit Fine’s arguments in Essence and Modality are widely accepted as being a decisive blow against modal essentialism. A selection of replies exist that have done little to counter the general view that modally construed essence is out of touch with what we really mean when we make essentialist claims. I argue that Fine’s arguments fail to strike a decisive blow, and I suggest a new interpretation of the debate that shows why Fine’s arguments fall short of achieving their goal.

Many have been tempted to invoke a primitive notion of grounding to describe the way in which some features of reality give rise to others. Jessica Wilson argues that such a notion is unnecessary to describe the structure of the world: that we can make do with specific dependence relations such as the part–whole relation or the determinate–determinable relation, together with a notion of absolute fundamentality. In this paper I argue that such resources are inadequate to describe the particular ways (...) in which some parts of reality give rise to others, and thus that we do in fact need grounding. (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

It has been suggested that many philosophical theses—physicalism, normative naturalism, phenomenalism, and so on—should be understood in terms of ground. Against this, Ted Sider (2011) has argued that ground is ill-suited for this purpose. Here I develop Sider’s objection and offer a response. In doing so I develop a view about the role of ground in philosophy, and about the content of these distinctively philosophical theses.

According to the modal view, essence admits of reductive analysis in exclusively modal terms. Fine (1994) argues that modal view delivers an inadequate analysis of essence. This paper defends the modal view from Fine's challenge. This defense proceeds by examining the disagreement between Finean primitivists and Quinean eliminativists about essence. In order to model this disagreement, a distinction between essence and a separable concept, nature, is required. This distinction is then used to show that Fine's challenge is misdirected and therefore (...) unsuccessful. (shrink)