Emma Jaura

Western metaphysics has been dominated by forms of foundationalism—views that commit to the existence of something fundamental. I contribute to the growing recent interest in challenging foundationalism, and enquiring into the possibility of alternatives. The alternative that I pursue and defend in this thesis, is a position that I call anti-foundationalist interdependence. This position refrains from commitment to fundamentalia, by holding that all existing things depend on something else for their existence and identity. I work towards developing an account of this kind, by searching for support amongst analytic metaphysics (especially amongst recent work on metaphysical coherentism), Buddhist philosophy (especially amongst the work of Nāgārjuna), and from current physics (especially from Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics). Using insight from these areas to produce a picture of the structure of reality which lacks foundations, serves to fill an important gap in the fundamentality debate.

There have been a number of recent attempts to identify the best metaphysical framework for capturing Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM). All such accounts commit to some form of fundamentalia, whether they be traditional objects, physical relations, events or ‘flashes’, or the cosmos as a fundamental whole. However, Rovelli’s own recommendation is that ‘a natural philosophical home for RQM is an anti-foundationalist perspective' (Rovelli in Philos Trans R Soc 376:10, 2018). This gives us some prima facie reason to explore options beyond these foundationalist frameworks, and take seriously a picture that lacks fundamentalia. I construct an argument from elimination in favour of an anti-foundationalist interpretation of RQM. The argument notes that _priority monism_ and _priority pluralism_ are exhaustive foundationalist options, and then shows that there are reasons to reject their union with RQM. I finish by recommending _metaphysical coherentism_ as a promising anti-foundationalist alternative, which captures the key characteristics of RQM through accepting symmetrical dependence, whilst avoiding challenges by jettisoning any commitment to fundamental entities.