Dependence, Justification and Explanation: Must Reality be Well-Founded?

Morganti, Matteo

doi:10.1007/s10670-014-9655-4

Cited by 28 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…For some discussion of the formal mechanics see Schock (1968). 21 Morganti (2015) argues that nihilism need not follow even given the joint presence of non-foundationalism and eliminativism if existence is allowed to emerge from an infinitely descending chain of dependence relations. Morganti sees this as the ontological equivalent of the emergence of epistemic justification from chains of reasons that stretch infinitely backwards as discussed by Peijnenburg and Atkinson (2013).…”

Section: The Actuality Of Nihilismmentioning

confidence: 99%

An argument for ontological nihilism

Westerhoff

2021

Inquiry

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This paper has two main aims. I first argue that ontological nihilism, that is, the view that there are no things is a consistent position. Second, I discuss an argument for the view that nihilism is not just possible but actually true, that is that there actually are no things (This paper is not meant as an addition to the considerable literature on the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Of course, any attempt to answer this question would have to presuppose the conclusion of the first section, that is, that nihilism is a consistent position. But if the argument in the second section goes through the question we would then have to answer is not why there is something rather than nothing, but why there is nothing rather than something). My argument is based on two main premisses, eliminativism ('only the fundamental exists') and non-foundationalism ('it's dependence all the way down') which jointly entail ontological nihilism. I conclude with some reflections on the consequences of the nihilist position for the project of constructing a fundamental metaphysical theory.

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Section: The Actuality Of Nihilismmentioning

confidence: 99%

An argument for ontological nihilism

Westerhoff

2021

Inquiry

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“…3. Morganti (2015), in particular, presents a physical model-Georgi (1989)'s-in which, prima facie, all particles satisfy strong PII. 42 See, among others, Carnap (1947), Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), Goodman (1955), Adams (1979), Rosenkrantz (1979), Khamara (1988), Humberstone (1996), Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006), Cowling (2015), Hoffmann-Kolss (2019), Plate (2021).…”

Section: Anti-haecceitism Without Fundamentalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-Haecceitism and Fundamentality

Scarpati

2021

Erkenn

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Is everything about reality either qualitative or somehow determined by the qualitative character of reality itself? Metaphysical anti-Haecceitism is often taken to be the claim that this is the case, and to entail that reality is fundamentally qualitative. In this paper, I (1) argue against the idea that metaphysical anti-Haecceitism should be characterized in such terms, and (2) defend a novel way to phrase such a view. This will be done by taking the main arguments for anti-Haecceitism as a guide and by singling out the proper commitments of a view that satisfies the desideratum set forth by such arguments. The phrasing I shall offer will help tell the issue of anti-Haecceitism apart from some concerns about fundamentality that, I will contend, are orthogonal to it—among them, the question whether there is fundamentality at all.

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“…There has been some debate in the literature as to how this notion should be understood, but a recent consensus has begun to form around the view that for a grounding chain to be well-founded is for every grounded fact in the chain to be fully grounded by facts which themselves do not require any grounds (see Dixon 2016, p. 446;Rabin and Rabern 2016, p. 366; for a related claim see Litland 2016). Early work on ground tended to assume without much argument that chains of ground must be well-founded (e.g., Schaffer 2010, p. 37), but this assumption has come under increasing criticism (Bliss 2013;Morganti 2015;Tahko 2014, and the papers in Bliss and Priest 2018).…”

Section: Recent Themesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Michele Lubrano, in his paper The Emergence of Ground: Some Limitative Results tackles this issue. He discusses a recent argument that grounding chains need not be well-founded, provided by Matteo Morganti (2015), who argues that in an infinitely long grounding chain the obtaining of a grounded fact is not something passed up to this fact from its immediate grounds (the transmis-sion model), but comes from the infinite chain of grounds as a whole (the emergence model). Morganti defends this claim by adopting an argument originally developed by Jeanna Peijnenburg and David Atkinson in defence of epistemological infinitism (2013).…”

Section: The Papers In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

New frontiers in ground, essence, and modality: introduction

O’Conaill

Tahko

2018

Synthese

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Ground, essence, and modality seem to have something to do with each other. Can we provide unified foundations for ground and essence, or should we treat each as primitives? Can modality be grounded in essence, or should essence be expressed in terms of modality? Does grounding entail necessitation? Are the notions of ground and essence univocal? This volume focuses on the links-or lack thereof-between these three notions, as well as the foundations of ground, essence, and modality more generally, bringing together work on the metaphysics, epistemology, and logic of these three notions by some of the leading figures in the field as well as emerging young scholars. The invited contributors to this volume presented their work at a conference on Ground, Essence, and Modality at the University of Helsinki in June 2016, funded by the Academy of Finland Project The Epistemology of Metaphysics: From Rationalism to Nominalism. This conference is just one of many recent high-profile events and publications on these themes (e.g., the edited volumes Correia and Schnieder 2012a; Sirkel and Tahko 2014; Jago 2016). After providing a brief historical summary of the (re)emergence of modality, essence and ground as central notions in metaphysics (Sect. 1), we shall outline some of the main themes in recent work on these notions and on the links between them (Sect. 2). In Sect. 3 we briefly introduce the papers in this volume. 1 Historical background The story of modality in the last century is a familiar one. For several decades modal discourse was shunned as suspiciously intensional or lacking empirical bona fides.

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Dependence, Justification and Explanation: Must Reality be Well-Founded?

Cited by 28 publications

References 23 publications

An argument for ontological nihilism

An argument for ontological nihilism

Anti-Haecceitism and Fundamentality

New frontiers in ground, essence, and modality: introduction

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