Grounding and ontological dependence in Late Medieval Philosophy

• Applicant: Magali Roques, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 331863444

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants