A Materialist Criterion of Fundamentality
Abstract
What are the fundamental inhabitants of the world? This question, as old as it is new, is about the fundamental structure of our world. Is our world a world of Aristotle’s ordinary substances, Locke’s physical substances, Husserl’s wholes, Wittgenstein’s facts, Sellars’s processes, or Quine’s sets? In order to distinguish the sort of metaphysical fundamentality at stake in this discussion from other possible types of fundamentality, I shall call it from now on “world-fundamentality.” In this article I want to make a proposal in the context of this metaphysical dispute. The proposal is the addition of a new criterion of world-fundamentality to the existing catalog of independence and simplicity, among some other prominent classical examples. I call this criterion “the materialist criterion of world-fundamentality” because it states that metaphysicians should not decide the question of whether our world is a world of facts rather than a world of sets or other categories without considering the explanatory power of such categories to account for the relation between “the manifest image” and “the scientific image,” to use the words of Wilfrid Sellars (1963).
References
Baker, Lynne Rudder (2013). Naturalism and the First–Person Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199914722.001.0001
Bergmann, Gustav (1965). Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Cumpa, Javier (2011). «Categoriality: Three Disputes over the Structure of the World». En: Ontological Categories, editado por Javier Cumpa y Erwin Tegtmeier. Fráncfort: Ontos Verlag, pp. 15–65. doi: 10.1515/9783110329599.15
Cumpa, Javier (2014). «Exemplication as Molecular Function». Philosophical Studies 170 (2): pp. 335–342. Doi: 10.1007/s11098-013-0222-7
Gracia, Jorge (1987). Individuality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Grossmann, Reinhardt (1983). The Categorical Structure of the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heil, John (2012). The Universe As We Find It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596201.001.0001
Hempel, Carl Gustav y Oppenheim, Paul (1953). «The Logic of Explanation». En: Readings in the Philosophy of Science, editado por Herbert Feigl y May Brodbeck. Nueva York: Appleton Century Crofts, pp. 319–352.
Jackson, Frank (2000). From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/0198250614.001.0001
Sellars, Wilfrid (1963). «Philosophy and the Scientic Image of Man». En Science, Perception, and Reality. Londres: Routledge y Kegan Paul, pp. 1–40.
Sider, Ted (2012). Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tegtmeier, Erwin (1992). Grundzüge einer kategorialen Ontologie: Dinge, Eigenschaften, Beziehungen, Sachverhalten. Friburgo: Alber.
Copyright (c) 2016 Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
