Preface

Abstract

Extract I first encountered explicit theorizing about grounding when I heard Kit Fine give “The Question of Realism” as the Reichenbach Lecture at UCLA near the turn of the 21st century. I was then a graduate student working in the metaphysics of modality. A prominent idea in that literature is that modal reality is somehow second class: it is dependent on and determined by non-modal reality. This tended at the time to get characterized as the idea that modal reality somehow reduces to non-modal reality. That struck me as an overly narrow conception of what was at issue. The conception of ground Fine introduced in the lecture seemed to me a better alternative, so I was excited. Fine’s paper was soon published as (Fine, 2001). By the late 2000s, the idea of grounding had taken off. It was developed, defended, and criticized by a number of prominent thinkers, whom another philosopher has dubbed the “grounding celebrities.” It had a brief few years as perhaps the most fashionable topic in metaphysics, if not all of academic philosophy.