Grounding and ontological dependence in Late Medieval Philosophy

该项目的目的是第一次调查14世纪中世纪哲学中的接地概念，特别强调Duns Scotus和William of Ockham。接地的概念与日常语言中的解释一词密切相关。更准确地说，许多哲学家把“接地”指的是一种独特的形而上学解释。直到最近，普遍持有的观点是，除了Bolzano和Husserl等少数例外，对基础的持续讨论是最近才出现的现象。然而，有时有人认为，哲学对基础的反思可以追溯到古代，最近亚里士多德主义在形而上学中的复兴引起了对形而上学的基本观点的重新关注。然而，中世纪亚里士多德传统中的接地概念并不广为人知。这个项目的主要目的是填补我们对接地概念的历史知识的空白。我打算写一本关于斯各脱斯和奥卡姆关于本体论依赖和基础的观点的专著。司各脱声称存在一种非因果关系的依赖。我认为，这种非因果依赖相当于当代辩论中所谓的接地。我的目的是解释这种依赖如何以及为什么可以与当代关于接地的观点相比较。我还打算说明奥卡姆对斯科特斯观点的批评是如何使他去研究一种非因果依赖，这种依赖将取代斯科特斯的形式区分所起的解释作用。到目前为止，学者们已经将中世纪的接地定义为物质和事故之间的关系。我的目的是纠正这种认同，当司各脱和奥卡姆援引本体论依赖关系时，他们这样做并不是为了给实体下一个独立的正确定义。相反，他们诉诸于一种非因果依赖，这种依赖与当代的基础概念相对应，以解释逻辑有效性的概念，三位一体的位格及其属性之间的关系，实体的结合，以及模态真理的真理制造者。该项目还追求一个哲学目标。它旨在将目前被分开的两种辩论结合起来，即目前关于形而上学解释的辩论和关于科学哲学中解释的古老但正在进行的辩论。如果非因果数学解释的合理性不亚于自然科学中的因果解释，那么是什么证明存在这两种不同的解释？中世纪的科学解释概念可以用来表明因果解释和非因果解释有一个共同的根源。

The aim of this project is to investigate the conception of grounding in fourteenth-century medieval philosophy for the first time, with a special emphasis on Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The notion of grounding is closely related to the term explaining in ordinary language. More precisely, many philosophers take grounding to refer to a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation. Until recently the generally held view has been that sustained discussion of grounding is, with a few exceptions such as Bolzano and Husserl, a recent phenomenon. However, it has sometimes been argued that philosophical reflection on grounding goes back to antiquity, and the recent renewal of Aristotelianism in metaphysics has given rise to a renewed interest in scholastic views on the metaphysics of fundamentality. However, the conceptions of grounding in the Aristotelian tradition of the Middle Ages are not widely known. The main aim of this project is to fill this gap in our knowledge of the history of the notion of grounding. I intend to write a monograph on Scotus s and Ockham s views on ontological dependence and grounding. Scotus claims that there is a kind of dependence which is not causal. I believe that this kind of non-causal dependence is equivalent to what is called grounding in the contemporary debate. My aim is to explain how and why this kind of dependence can be compared to contemporary views on grounding. I also intend to show how Ockham s criticism of Scotus s view led him to investigate a kind of non-causal dependence that would take over the explanatory role played by Scotus s formal distinction. Until now, scholars have identified the medieval counterpart to grounding as the relation that holds between substance and accident. I aim to correct this identification by arguing that, when Scotus and Ockham invoke the relation of ontological dependence, they do not do so in order to give a correct definition of substance as that which is independent. Rather, they appeal to a kind of non-causal dependence that corresponds to the contemporary notion of grounding in order to explain the idea of logical validity, the relation between the Persons of the Trinity and their properties, the hypostatic union, and the truth-makers of modal truths. The project also pursues a philosophical goal. It aims to bring together two debates that are currently kept apart, namely the current debate on metaphysical explanation and the old but ongoing debate on explanation in philosophy of science. If non-causal mathematical explanations are no less legitimate than causal explanations in natural science, what justifies there being these two distinct kinds of explanation? The medieval concept of scientific explanation can be used in order to show that causal and non-causal explanations have a common root.