Taylor-Grey Miller

We provide an argument for the thesis that there could not have been nothing, given that there is something. Only one non-logical assumption goes into our argument. The assumption in question is supported by intuitive considerations as well as by three currently popular views about metaphysical modality. Moreover, our argument can be proven to be valid in the weak modal system K. If a posteriori assumptions are permitted, then the argument can be extended into an argument for why there could not have been nothing, period. The extended argument avoids the controversial assumptions made by previous attempts to establish the same thesis

I present a variety of ways that being deputized to speak on someone’s behalf can produce interesting kinds of illocutionary harm. In particular, I show that being deputized to speak for others can lead to important kinds of inability to speak for oneself (in ways not easily remediated). I then argue that this harm is exacerbated in the case of being deputized to speak on God’s behalf. From an Abrahamic religious perspective, there is a very real threat that so long as the matter about which one speaks is of interest to God, one will not have the ability to guarantee that one fails to thereby speak on God’s behalf. With these results in hand, I draw a modest upshot for the divine hiddenness debate. Certain patterns of divine manifestation which would produce non-resistant non-believers are bound up in interesting ways with divine deputizations. Thus, we have a readily recognizable human good at stake in such manifestations: the ability to speak merely for ourselves.

Essentialist facts, facts about what is essential to what, are explanatorily distinctive. They can often be appealed to in the course of metaphysically explaining some fact, while themselves serving as explanatory ends. In other words, when one arrives in the course of an explanation at an essentialist fact, it often seems like a legitimate place to stop. In certain contexts, they seem to provide a metaphysical backstop to making further explanatory demands. This paper defends the view that essentialist facts are zero-grounded. Just as we can think of certain logical truths as truths derivable from the empty set of premises, we can think of the zero-grounded facts as the facts that obtain in virtue of the empty set of facts. On this picture, the essentialist facts are grounded, but they are grounded literally in nothing—grounded for free, automatically, and by default. This view has been unpopular for many reasons, including concerns about the obscurity of the notion of zero-grounding. Concerns notwithstanding, I make the case that the zero-grounding view fares better than the alternative ground-theoretic accounts in making sense of certain explanatory roles essences plausibly play. After some preliminary remarks on how we should understand what an essentialist fact is as well as which ones serve as explanation stoppers, I introduce a widespread and attractive picture of what the essentialist facts are; they are domain fixing facts. I then argue that this feature of the essentialist facts well-positions them to serve as explanation stoppers. Afterwards, I argue that the zero-ground view best accommodates the domain-fixing conception of essence.