LanCog Lectures in Metaphysics 2013 Dispensing with Ontological Levels: an Illustration 1

Does metaphysics, or does it not, need ontological levels? Should metaphysics endorse the thesis that things of some kinds are ontologically more fundamental than things of some other kinds? Must it be a datum of metaphysics that entities of certain kinds are ontologically grounded in entities of certain other kinds? Must it be a feature of any adequate metaphysical theory that it awards a special ontological status to entities of certain kinds and denies this special status to entities of other kinds? There are two ways to approach these questions (or this question — for the four questions I have asked are essentially the same question). I’ll call them, tendentiously perhaps, the Bad Way and the Good Way. This is the Bad Way: Begin by giving examples of pairs of things that supposedly occupy different ontological levels (or one of which is ontologically more fundamental than the other or one of which is ontologically grounded in the other or one of which enjoys a special ontological status denied to the other). Proceed to use these examples as intuition pumps in the service of an affirmative answer to our question. Alternatively, play the other side of the game: insist that the default answer to our question is No, and dispute the examples that your opponents say support an affirmative answer — deny the existence of some of the entities that figure in the examples, or deny that there is any reason to suppose that the members of any of the pairs do occupy different ontological levels. (And similarly for the other formulations of the question.)