Turtles all the way down: Regress, priority and fundamentality

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 230, 2008, Pages 1-14

  Cameron, Ross P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949477982     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.509.x     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford UP, 1968), pp. 21-9
2. See R. Gaskin, 'Bradley's Regress, the Copula and the Unity of the Proposition', The Philosophical Quarterly, 45 (1995), pp. 161-80
3. D.M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 157-8
4. See J. Schaffer, 'Monism: the Priority of the Whole', and 'The Least Discerning and Most Promiscuous Truthmaker', http://www.people.umass.edu/ schaffer/Papers.htm
5. Leibniz, From the Letters to Arnauld, in R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds), G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Indiana: Hackett, 1989), pp. 69-90, at p. 85; my italics
6. M. Devitt, Realism and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)
7. C.S. Jenkins, 'Realism and Independence', American Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (2005), pp. 199-211, argues this in detail
8. The distinction between essence and modality is familiar from K. Fine, 'Essence and Modality', Philosophical Perspectives, 8 (1994), pp. 1-16. An essential connection entails a necessary connection, but not vice versa
9. See, e.g., Leibniz, On the Ultimate Origination of Things, and Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, both in Ariew and Garber (eds), G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, pp. 149-55, 206-13 (see p. 210)
10. B. Russell, 'Why I Am Not a Christian', in L. Greenspan and S. Andersson (eds), Russell on Religion (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 77-91, at p. 79. Actually, Russell was talking about the causal version, but the same challenge arises for the Leibnizian version
11. Schaffer may have something like this in mind. In his 'Is There a Fundamental Level?', Noûs, 37 (2003), pp. 498-517, he says (p. 498) that an 'ontological attitude according to which the entities of the fundamental level are primarily real, while any remaining contingent entities are at best derivative, if real at all' is 'a natural (though not inevitable) conclusion' of the view of reality as 'stratified into levels'
12. R.P. Cameron, 'The Contingency of Composition', Philosophical Studies (forthcoming)