The Structure of Fundamentality

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Benjamin Schnieder
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448954791

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

It is a perennial philosophical question whether, in order to obtain, every fact needs a fundament on which it rests, or whether there are also brute or fundamental facts, which lay the basis for other facts while not resting on any fundament themselves. This research project was concerned with the idea of fundamentality at work in this question. Philosophical interest in the notion of fundamentality has a long and rich history. It has played a central role in metaphysics from ancient times onwards, and it still has a pivotal place in the contemporary debate. The notion of fundamentality has also prominently figured in the philosophy of science, for instance in theories of explanation, debates about theory choice, and the formulation of scientific realism. This research project focused on a ground-theoretical approach on which the fundamentality is a property of facts defined in terms of grounding. As is standard in the contemporary debate, grounding is understood as an objective and productive priority relation between facts. The notion of grounding opens up a straightforward, simple way to define fundamentality: A fact x is fundamental iffdf. x does not have any grounds. This captures a natural and traditional understanding of fundamentality, since grounding is a relation connecting a fundament with what is built on it. The definition is thus prominent in the current debate on grounding and fundamentality. The aim of the project was threefold: (i) to deepen our understanding of the ground-theoretical approach by examining pertinent aspects of the theory of grounding, and by comparing the approach with contemporary alternatives and historical predecessors; (ii) to defend the ground-theoretical approach to fundamentality against objections; (iii) to develop the ground-theoretical approach further by developing more sophisticated ways of defining fundamentality in terms of grounding. In particular, the project explored 1. the idea that some facts may be partially grounded without being fully grounded in any facts, so that some facts can be partially fundamental, and 2. the idea that facts that are not grounded in other facts divide into those that are simply ungrounded and those which are zero-grounded. Grounding is usually taken to be an explanatory notion, so that a fact is metaphysically explained by its grounds. So the simple account of fundamentality typically goes along with taking fundamental facts to be explanatorily basic in the sense that they lack a metaphysical explanation. That a fact is fundamental, i.e. lacks grounds, would thus constrain our ability to understand why the fact obtains. One major result of the project is a sustained argument for the claim that there can be fundamental facts (in the ground-theoretical sense) that possess a metaphysical explanation, even though they do not have grounds: There is explanatory structure to the fundamental that can help us even understand why fundamental facts themselves obtain.

Publications

• Explanation by status as empty-base explanation. Synthese, 199(1-2), 2575-2595.
  Kappes, Yannic
  
• Mereological endurantism and being a whole at a time: reply to Costa. Inquiry, 67(9), 2874-2883.
  Loss, Roberto
  
• Open future, supervaluationism and the growing-block theory: a stage-theoretical account. Synthese, 199(5-6), 14249-14266.
  Loss, Roberto
  
• Two notions of fusion and the landscape of extensionality. Philosophical Studies, 178(10), 3443-3463.
  Loss, Roberto
  
• A Fundamental Being. Bolzano's Philosophy of Grounding, 418-444. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Schnieder, Benjamin
  
• A Survey of Bolzano’s Theory of Grounding. Bolzano's Philosophy of Grounding, 4-34. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Roski, Stefan & Schnieder, Benjamin
  
• Bolzano's Philosophy of Grounding. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Roski, Stefan & Schnieder, Benjamin
  
• How the Block Grows. American Philosophical Quarterly, 59(4), 377-389.
  Loss, Roberto
  
• Self-Explanation and Empty-Base Explanation. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 8(3), 436-453.
  KAPPES, YANNIC
  
• States of Affairs and Fundamentality. Philosophia, 51(1), 411-421.
  De Rizzo, Julio & Schnieder, Benjamin Sebastian
  
• Universalism doesn’t entail extensionalism. Analysis, 82(2), 246-255.
  Loss, Roberto
  
• Empty-Base Explanation. De Gruyter.
  Kappes, Yannic
  
• Grounding Ground and the (In-)Escapable Ill-Foundedness of the Inclusive `Explains'. Dialectica, 77(4), 521-537.
  Kappes, Yannic
  
• Bolzano’s Tortoise and a loophole for Achilles. Synthese, 203(3).
  Kappes, Yannic
  
• Generalized Identity, Zero-Ground, and Necessity. Erkenntnis, 90(7), 3017-3028.
  Kappes, Yannic
  
• No Reduction of Slot-Filling to Grounding and Essence, in Yannic Kappes, Asya Passinsky, Julio De Rizzo & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Facets of Reality – Contemporary Debates. Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 859–867
  Li, Xiao