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Calvin G. Normore and Stephan Schmid (eds.), Grounding in Medieval Philosophy, Springer, 2024, 333pp., $159.99 (hbk), ISBN 9783031536656.
Reviewed by Han Thomas Adriaenssen, University of Groningen
In contemporary metaphysics, the term grounding has come to be used to pick out a certain kind of non-causal priority or explanation. Thus, when it is said that parts ground the whole, the claim is that parts are somehow prior to, and explanatory of, the whole, without the parts causing the whole in any obvious sense of the term. And when moral facts are said to be grounded in natural facts, the claim is that natural facts are in a sense prior to, and explanatory of, natural facts, without it being the case that the former act as a cause of the latter.
The recent interest in this phenomenon of non-causal priority or explanation is sometimes presented as part of what we might think of…
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