[Revised entry by Tuomas E. Tahko and E. Jonathan Lowe on May 1, 2025.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Ontological dependence is a relation – or, more accurately, a family of relations – between entities or beings (onta in Greek, whence ontological). For there are various ways in which one being may be said to depend upon one or more other beings, in a sense of “depend” that is distinctly metaphysical in character and that may be contrasted, thus, with various causal senses of this word. More specifically, a being may be said to depend, in such a sense,…

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