University of Melbourne
School of Historical And Philosophical Studies
PhD
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy
Metaphysics
  •  99
    Metaphysical Overdetermination
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1): 1-23. 2023.
    It is widely recognized by proponents of the notion that grounding can be, indeed is, overdetermined. Moreover, it seems safe to suppose that something of a consensus has emerged: grounding is overdetermined and there is nothing about it that we ought to find concerning. Not only is the overdetermination apparently not problematic, metaphysically speaking, but that grounding is overdetermined is not problematic, conceptually speaking, either. From a small sampling of alleged cases, however, no s…Read more
  •  58
    The Non-Existence of the Real World by Jan Westerhoff (review)
    Philosophy East and West 71 (3): 1-7. 2021.
    Commitment to the idea that there is something real can be found in a variety of different places, perhaps the most obvious expressions of which are in the ideas that there is a real world outside our heads, an external world, and that we ourselves are surely real. In addition to these somewhat quotidian commitments, philosophers also find homes for the real in more abstract, theoretical locations--chief amongst them being that the world contains something fundamental, the reals, and that there …Read more
  •  394
    Review of: Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen, Necessary Existence (review)
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (4): 213-218. 2020.
  •  24
    Primitivism and relative fundamentality
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (7): 693-710. 2020.
    ABSTRACT In her Making Things Up, amongst the many other achievements of the volume, Bennett develops a rich account of relative fundamentality. She also defends a kind of deflationism about the notion: relative fundamentality is nothing over and above patterns of building. In this essay, I argue that the best and common competitor of this view – primitivism about relative fundamentality – is in worse shape than Bennett's evaluation would indicate. Deflationism looks to be the best view.
  •  93
    The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics (edited book)
    Routledge. 2020.
    Philosophical questions regarding the nature and methodology of philosophical inquiry have garnered much attention in recent years. Perhaps nowhere are these discussions more developed than in relation to the field of metaphysics. The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics is an outstanding reference source to this growing subject. It comprises thirty-eight chapters written by leading international contributors, and is arranged around five themes: • The history of metametaphysics • Neo-Quinean…Read more
  •  50
    Primitivism and relative fundamentality
    Tandf: Inquiry 1-18. forthcoming.
    .In her Making Things Up, amongst the many other achievements of the volume, Bennett develops a rich account of relative fundamentality. She also defends a kind of deflationism about the notion: relative fundamentality is nothing over and above patterns of building. In this essay, I argue that the best and common competitor of this view – primitivism about relative fundamentality – is in worse shape than Bennett's evaluation would indicate. Deflationism looks to be the best view.
  •  204
    What Work the Fundamental?
    Erkenntnis 84 (2): 359-379. 2019.
    Although it is very often taken for granted that there is something fundamental, the literature appears to have developed with little to no careful consideration of what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are supposed to do. If we are to have a good reason to believe that there is something fundamental, we need not only to know what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are invoked for, but why it is that nothing else is available for the task to hand. A good argument in defense of fundamentali…Read more
  •  665
    Metaphysical grounding
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
    General discussion of grounding, including its formal features, relations to other notions, and applications. (Originally published 2014; revised 2021)
  •  229
  •  69
    Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Fifteen leading philosophers explore metaphysical foundationalism, the idea that reality has an over-arching hierarchical structure ordered by relations of metaphysical dependence, where chains of entities ordered by those dependence relations terminate in something fundamental.
  •  429
    Viciousness and the structure of reality
    Philosophical Studies 166 (2): 399-418. 2013.
    Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of v…Read more
  •  262
    Viciousness and Circles of Ground
    Metaphilosophy 45 (2): 245-256. 2014.
    Metaphysicians of a certain stripe are almost unanimously of the view that grounding is necessarily irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and well-founded. They deny the possibility of circles of ground and, therewith, the possibility of species of metaphysical coherentism. But what's so bad about circles of ground? One problem for coherentism might be that it ushers in anti-foundationalism: grounding loops give rise to infinite regresses. And this is bad because infinite grounding regresses are …Read more