The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding

Michael Raven, Michael J. Raven, Michael Raven, Michael J. Raven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815366492
• eBook ISBN: 9781351258821
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Some of philosophy's biggest questions, both historically and today, are in-virtue-of questions: In virtue of what is an action right or wrong? In virtue of what am I the same person my mother bore? In virtue of what is an artwork beautiful? Philosophers attempt to answer many of these types of in-virtue-of questions, but philosophers are also increasingly focusing on what an in-virtue-of question is in the first place. Many assume, at least as a working hypothesis, that in-virtue-of questions involve a distinctively metaphysical kind of determinative explanation called "ground." This Handbook surveys the state of the art on ground as well as its connections and applications to other topics. The central issues of ground are discussed in 37 chapters, all written exclusively for this volume by a wide range of leading experts. The chapters are organized into the following sections:

I. History

II. Explanation and Determination

III. Logic and Structure

IV. Connections

V. Applications

Introductions at the start of each section provide an overview of the section's contents, and a list of Related Topics at the end of each chapter points readers to other germane areas throughout the volume. The resulting volume is accessible enough for advanced students and informative enough for researchers. It is essential reading for anyone hoping to get clearer on what the biggest questions of philosophy are really asking.

PART I

History

INTRODUCTION

Michael J. Raven

Questions of ground are often introduced by example. Perhaps the most common, as well as venerable, example is from Plato’s Euthyphro. In that dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro muse about the nature of piety. Socrates acknowledges that an act is pious just in case it is loved by the gods. But he still wonders whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious or whether it is pious because it is loved by the gods. It is nowadays common for Socrates’s question to be interpreted as a question of ground. Is an act’s being loved by the gods grounded in its being pious or is its being pious grounded in its being loved by the gods? Aristotle’s notions of demonstration, the four causes, and their explanatory roles in the science of being qua being can be fruitfully interpreted in terms of ground. So there is a strong case to be made that interest in ground extends back to antiquity. Given the enormity of Plato’s and Aristotle’s influence on later philosophy, one might expect the history of ground to be a prominent chapter in the history of philosophy itself.

This impression, however, clashes with another portrayal of ground’s history. In the literature, one can find authors who sometimes write as if ground was a more recent innovation whose emergence had to wait for the anti-metaphysical sentiments trending in much of the 20th century to fade. This portrayal acknowledges ground’s historical roots. But the emphasis is instead on the recent surge of interest in ground, beginning with the trinity of Fine (2001), Schaffer (2009), and Rosen (2010), and followed soon after by a rapidly expanding, increasingly sophisticated literature.

It is not altogether clear how to reconcile the two portrayals of ground’s history. On the one hand, ground has a venerable history stretching back to antiquity. On the other hand, ground is largely a recent innovation whose history is still being written. A natural attempt to reconcile the portrayals starts by distinguishing questions of ground from questions about ground. Socrates’s question above, for example, is a question of ground. By contrast, whether ground is a strict partial order is not a question of ground but rather a question about ground. Questions of ground have engaged philosophers since antiquity. But questions about ground are, at least by comparison, more recent arrivals. This parallels how questions of possibility and necessity engaged philosophers since antiquity despite the comparatively recent focus on questions about possibility and necessity stemming from the late 20th century’s rapid developments in modal logic, modal metaphysics, and the like.¹

The main purpose of Part I is to survey some of the main historical antecedents of the recent surge of interest in it.

• 1. Phil Corkum’s “Ancient” selectively surveys potential historical precedents to ground in the pre-Socratics, Plato’s Euthyphro, and Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics. Corkum’s essay also asks a methodological question: when is ground a useful tool for ancient philosophy scholarship?
• 2. Marko Malink’s “Aristotelian Demonstration” discusses Aristotle’s treatment of direct and indirect demonstrations. Malink gives an account of Aristotle’s influential thesis in the Posterior Analytics that all direct but not all indirect demonstrations proceed from premises that are prior in nature to the conclusion. The relevant notion of priority in nature can be viewed as a relation of ground. Malink indicates how Aristotle’s thesis correlates with recent developments in the pure and impure logic of ground.
• 3. Margaret Cameron’s “Medieval and Early Modern” observes that philosophers in the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods recognized the phenomena of metaphysical explanation, relations of metaphysical dependence, and relations of priority more broadly. To illustrate, Cameron analyzes the various and varied answers to the frequently asked question, “What is the subject matter of metaphysics?” Answers from Avicenna, Averroes, Aquinas, Suárez, Descartes, and Leibniz are analyzed. By examining the reasons for their answers to this question, one may get a broad understanding of how these philosophers understood the nature of metaphysical explanation and relations of metaphysical dependence.
• 4. Fatema Amijee’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason” addresses three central questions. First, to what extent is the contemporary notion of metaphysical explanation continuous with the notion of sufficient reason endorsed by Spinoza, Leibniz, and other rationalists? Second, to what extent can the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)—the principle that everything has an explanation—avoid the formidable traditional objections levelled against it if it is formulated in terms of metaphysical explanation? And finally, how might historical discussion of the PSR shed light on the contemporary notions of ground and metaphysical explanation?
• 5. Stefan Roski’s “Bolzano” discusses Bernard Bolzano’s views about ground. It briefly highlights historical influences on Bolzano’s account and subsequently provides an overview of the most important aspects of it. A main focus of Roski’s essay lies on relating Bolzano’s ideas to positions familiar from the current debate about ground, including ideas that differ from current orthodoxy but may constitute interesting additions, challenges, or inspirations for the current debate.
• 6. Kevin Mulligan’s “Austro-German Phenomenologists” surveys some of the main accounts of ground, dependence, foundation, and essence as well as some important applications thereof to philosophical questions which were put forward at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century by the early Austro-Germanic phenomenologists and other heirs of Brentano (such as Meinong, Husserl, Reinach, and Scheler).

Note

1 This attempt at reconciling the two portrayals of ground’s history is further discussed in Raven (2019).

References

Fine, K. (2001). The Question of Realism. Philosophers’ Imprint, 1(2), 1–30.

Raven, M. J. (2019). (Re)discovering Ground. In K. M. Becker & I. Thomson (Eds.), Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945 to 2015 (pp. 147–159). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction. In B. Hale & A. Hoffmann (Eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (pp. 109–136). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schaffer, J. (2009). On What Grounds What. In D. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (pp. 347–383). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1

ANCIENT

Phil Corkum

Is there grounding in ancient philosophy? To ask a related but different question: Is grounding a useful tool for the scholar of ancient philosophy? These questions are difficult, and my goal in this chapter is not so much to give definitive answers as to clarify the questions. I hope to direct the student of contemporary metaphysics towards passages where it may be fruitful to look for historical precedent. But I also hope to offer the student of ancient philosophy some guidance on when drawing on the contemporary discussion of grounding may be beneficial.

Both issues hinge in part on how we ought to view grounding. Some theorists view grounding as the correlate of the in virtue of or because relation. Ancient philosophy abounds with such relations. Here’s a sampler.

• The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales claims that water is the principle of all things. Subsequent philosophers offer other candidates. For example, Anaximenes views air as the principle and Anaximander the indefinite. One might view these claims as the suggestion that a given thing is so-and-so because water (or air or the indefinite) is the way it is. I discuss Thales in more detail in what follows.
• In Plato’s Euthyphro, the character of Socrates wonders whether a thing is pious because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is pious. Plato also aims to explain the behaviour of sensible, changing particulars by appeal to intelligible, unchanging Forms. For example, in the Republic, he claims that an act, agent or state are all called just because they participate in the Form of Justice. I discuss some of Plato’s views in what follows.
• In his Physics 2.3, Aristotle discusses four kinds of causes. He writes that “we think we have knowledge of a thing only when we can answer the question about it ‘On account of what?’ and that is to grasp the primary cause.”¹ Causes seem to be explanations why a thing is the way it is or why it changes in the way that it does. The material cause is “that out of which as a constituent a thing comes to be … for example, the bronze and the silver and their genera would be the causes respectively of a statue.” The formal cause, “the account of what the being would be,” corresponds to a definition of the thing. The efficient cause is the “source of the change” and seems to involve what initiates a process; Aristotle gives the example that the parent is a cause of the child. The final cause, “what something is for” includes the goal of purposive action, but also includes the state achieved or the product which results from an activity.
• In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle lays out a rubric for scientific explanation. At the beginning of the Second Book, he describes his aims:

• The things we seek are equal in number to those we understand. We seek four things: the fact, the reason why, if something is, what something is. … When we know the fact we seek the reason why (e.g., knowing that it is eclipsed or that the earth moves, we seek the reason why it is eclipsed or why it moves). (APo 2.1, 89b21–31)

• We seek understanding. When some fact (to hoti) is known to obtain, we seek the reason why (to dioti) it is so, or an account of the fact. Aristotle continues:

• As we said, to know what something is and to know the explanation (aition) of whether it is are the same; and the account of the fact that something is is the explanation (aition). This is either the same as it or something else; and if it is something else, it is either demonstrable or indemonstrable. If it is something else and it is possible to demonstrate it, then the explanation (aition) must be a middle term and the proof must be in the first figure; for what is being proved is both universal and positive. (APo 2.8, 93a3–9)

• Scientific understanding is through an aition—in the above quotation, Barnes translates this as ‘explanation’ but in other contexts, the expression is often translated as ‘cause’. For example, this is how Charlton (1970) translates aition when Aristotle discusses his doctrine of the four causes in Physics 2.3, discussed above. Aristotle’s discussion of explanations yielding scientific understan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I History
• Part II Explanation and Determination
• Part III Logic and Structure
• Part IV Connections
• Part V Applications
• The Essential Glossary of Ground
• Index