Research

Call metaphysicians who think that chains of ontological dependence must terminate in a collection of fundamental entities foundationalists. Call metaphysicians who think that chains of being can proceed ad infinitum infinitists. Foundationalists claim that foundationalism displays certain theoretical advantages over infinitism. First, some maintain that infinitism has a special explanatory problem that foundationalism doesn’t. Second, others maintain that foundationalism exhibits greater theoretical unity than infinitism. I argue that these considerations give us no reason to prefer foundationalism to infinitism. Against the foundationalist’s first purported advantage, I argue that foundationalists must make theoretical concessions similar to those infinitists must make (Sect. 1). And against the foundationalist’s second purported advantage – an advantage infinitists haven’t yet addressed – I argue that infinitism exhibits a different, but nevertheless attractive, kind of theoretical virtue; namely, infinitists explain all existence facts in similar ways (Sect. 2). I conclude that foundationalism and infinitism are, at worst, on a theoretical par (Sect. 3).

I provide a new, perception-based defense of ordinary ontology, the thesis that there exist ordinary objects but not extraordinary objects. To that end, I first outline a story about perception and perceptual justification – one informed by recent advances in cognitive science and philosophy of perception – according to which perception gives us reason to countenance ordinary things (Sect. 2). I then argue that extraordinary objects are just the sorts of entities our perceptual apparatus is well-poised to detect; thus, the fact that we fail to see extraordinary things gives us perceptual reason to repudiate them. I conclude that ordinary ontology is true (Sects. 3–5). In closing, I show that my way of defending ordinary ontology reveals that one of the most prominent objections to ordinary ontology rests on a mistake (Sect. 6).

Many philosophers think that common sense knowledge survives sophisticated philosophical proofs against it. Recently, however, Bryan Frances (‘Philosophical proofs against common sense’ 2021) has advanced a philosophical proof that he thinks common sense cannot survive. Exploiting philosophical paradoxes like the Sorites, Frances attempts to show how common sense leads to paradox and therefore that common sense methodology is unstable. In this paper, we show how Frances’s proof fails and then present Frances with a dilemma.

I argue that perceptual experience serves as a better basis for the epistemology of material object ontology than other potential justificatory sources.

I argue that a lawlike connection obtains between our experiences as of composite objects and the compositional facts.