The Structure of Fundamentality

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It is a perennial question whether, in order to obtain, every fact needs a fundament on which it rests, or whether there are also fundamental facts, which lay the basis for other facts while not resting on any fundament themselves. Accordingly, the notion of fundamentality has played a central role in metaphysics from ancient times onwards and still plays a pivotal role in the contemporary debate (it also figures prominently in philosophical areas other than metaphysics).This research project examines approaches to the idea of fundamentality that employ a notion which has garnered significant attention in recent debates in metaphysics: the notion of metaphysical grounding, understood as a productive priority relation in virtue of which some facts obtain because of others, i.e. their grounds. Within a ground-theoretical approach, the notion of fundamentality can be given a straightforward definition: A fact is fundamental if and only if it is not grounded in any further facts. But apart from this basic definition, the framework allows for more sophisticated variants of it. The research project has three aims:(i) To deepen our understanding of the ground-theoretical approach to fundamentality, and compare the approach with rival ones.(ii) To defend the ground-theoretical approach to fundamentality against objections raised in recent literature.(iii) Most importantly, to develop more sophisticated ways of defining fundamentality in terms of grounding, thus allowing for insightful distinctions and applications to which the simple definition is blind. As to this third, central aim of the project, we will in particular explore two themes:(A) The idea that some facts may be partially fundamental while not being fully fundamental (which is important, for instance, for the debate about emergence). In order to make room for this idea, we develop a novel account of the notion of a partial ground, on which some facts are partially grounded in other facts while lacking a full ground. Such facts can then be regarded as partially fundamental. We will develop this idea in a rigorous formal framework and demonstrate its fruitfulness for existing debates.(B) Kit Fine’s idea that there can be two sorts of facts that are not grounded in other facts: on the one hand, facts which are simply ungrounded (e.g. brute facts about the distribution of matter in space); on the other, facts which intuitively can count as grounded, though not grounded in any further facts (e.g. certain logical laws). This distinction gives rise to a corresponding one between two sorts of fundamentality which has hitherto gone unnoticed.