Grounding, Fundamentality and Ultimate Explanations

This Element explores the notions of grounding and fundamentality as they relate to ultimate explanations.

Ricki Bliss (Author)

9781009479394, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 April 2024

80 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1 cm, 0.26 kg

There is a long lineage of philosophers concerned with coming to understand what explains everything broadly construed, or within a certain, restricted domain. We call such explanations ultimate explanations. Contemporarily, philosophers of a certain stripe have devoted much attention to the notion of fundamentality - that there is something which is without explanation. This Element explores some of the connections between fundamentality and ultimate explanations both contemporarily and historically.

Introduction
1. Groundwork: grounding and fundamentality
2. The history of an idea: ultimate explanations and the bottom of the world
3. The metaphysics of fundamentality
4. The epistemology of fundamentality
5. Fundamentality: some misgivings and its alternatives
References.

Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]