Reality Making
Mark Jago
Abstract
What makes up reality, and how? This question is central to contemporary metaphysics, but is approached by its practitioners in a number of ways. We can ask: what kinds of entity are fundamental to reality? These fundamental entities (if there are any) are those that all the other entities depend on for their existence and their qualities. How do those dependent entities depend on the fundamental ones? How does one entity, or one kind of entity, ground another? What is this metaphysically important concept of grounding? What are material objects? How does our concept of an object operate, and ... More
What makes up reality, and how? This question is central to contemporary metaphysics, but is approached by its practitioners in a number of ways. We can ask: what kinds of entity are fundamental to reality? These fundamental entities (if there are any) are those that all the other entities depend on for their existence and their qualities. How do those dependent entities depend on the fundamental ones? How does one entity, or one kind of entity, ground another? What is this metaphysically important concept of grounding? What are material objects? How does our concept of an object operate, and how does it relate to our other concepts? This volume contains chapters which address these questions. Many of these chapters focus on grounding. They address questions of how entities noncausally depend on other entities for their existence and qualitative character, and consider the nature and importance of this dependence relation. They also consider what kinds of entity, if any, are fundamental to reality. They investigate the relationship between the fundamental and all the otherparts of reality. Some of them focus on material objects and their essences. What are material objects? Are they fundamental parts of reality? If not, how are they grounded? What grounds their essences and their modal properties? Together, these chapters represent the cutting-edge of a central topic in contemporary metaphysics.
Keywords:
reality,
making,
grounding,
fundamentality,
essence,
nature,
metaphysical dependence
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198755722 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198755722.001.0001 |
