Against Grounding Necessitarianism

Erkenntnis 80 (4):717-751 (2015)
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Abstract

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play

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Author's Profile

Alexander Skiles
Rutgers - New Brunswick

Citations of this work

Metaphysical grounding.Ricki Bliss & Kelly Trogdon - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Grounding, Essence, And Identity.Fabrice Correia & Alexander Skiles - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):642-670.
Fundamentality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Metaphysical Causation.Alastair Wilson - 2018 - Noûs 52 (4):723-751.
The Unity of Grounding.Selim Berker - 2018 - Mind 127 (507):729-777.

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