Grounding and ontological dependence in Late Medieval Philosophy

这个项目的目的是调查十四世纪中世纪哲学的基础概念的第一次，特别强调邓斯·司各脱和奥卡姆的威廉。根据的概念与日常语言中的解释密切相关。更确切地说，许多哲学家把接地指的是一种独特的形而上学的解释。直到最近，人们还普遍认为，除了博尔扎诺和胡塞尔等少数例外，持续不断地讨论基础问题是最近才出现的现象。然而，有时有人认为，哲学反思接地可以追溯到古代，和最近更新的形而上学的亚里士多德主义已经引起了新的兴趣，在经院哲学的基本形而上学的观点。然而，在中世纪的亚里士多德传统中，接地的概念并不广为人知。这个项目的主要目的是填补我们对接地概念历史的知识空白。我打算写一本关于司各脱和奥卡姆关于本体论依赖和基础的观点的专著。司各脱主张有一种非因果的依赖性。我认为，这种非因果的依赖，就相当于当代争论中所谓的接地。我的目的是解释这种依赖性如何以及为什么可以与当代关于接地的观点进行比较。我还打算说明奥卡姆对司各脱观点的批评是如何引导他研究一种非因果依赖性的，这种依赖性将取代司各脱的形式区分所起的解释作用。到目前为止，学者们已经确定了中世纪的对应接地之间的关系，实体和事故。我的目的是纠正这种认同，论证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作为独立实体的实体下一个正确的定义。相反，他们呼吁一种非因果关系的依赖性，对应于当代的概念基础，以解释逻辑有效性的想法，之间的关系的位格的Trinity和他们的属性，本质的联盟，和真理制造者的模态真理。该项目还追求一个哲学目标。它的目的是把目前分开的两个争论，即当前关于形而上学解释的争论和古老但正在进行的关于科学哲学解释的争论结合起来。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，那么有什么理由存在这两种截然不同的解释呢？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.