Structuralism is supposed to be a dissolver of metaphysical pseudodebates. This paper is a search for the thesis behind the rhetoric. Taking ‘spacetime structuralism’ as a case study, I identify six different theses that seem to share this name. My conclusions are largely negative: that those theses that are new are not plausible, and vice versa. The exception is structuralism as a rejection of...

Given an undirected connected network G = (V,E), n = |V |, m = |E|, and a weight function w : E 7→ R+, finding a basis of the cut space with minimum sum of the cut weights is termed Minimum Cut Basis Problem. This problem can be solved, e.g., by the algorithm of Gomory and Hu [GH61]. If, however, fundamentality is required, i.e., the basis is induced by a spanning tree T in G, the problem becom...

Abstract There is a ubiquitous claim in the grounding literature that metaphysical foundationalism violates principle of sufficient reason (PSR) virtue positing level ungrounded facts. I argue foundationalists can accept PSR if they are willing to replace fundamentality as independence with completeness and deny ground strict partial order. The upshot be compatible both infinitism, so presuppos...

Truth and Ontology is a lively book, brimming with arguments, and drawing the reader towards the radical conclusion that what is true does not depend on what there is. If there is a central line of argument, it is that the best account of truthmaking requires truths to be about their truthmakers, but negative existentials, modals, and claims about the past and future are not about what is, but ...

We should see the debate over the existence of spacetime as a debate about the fundamentality of spatiotemporal structure to the physical world. This is a non-traditional conception of the debate, which captures the spirit of the traditional one. At the same time, it clari es the point of contention between opposing views and offsets worries that the dispute is stagnant or non-substantive. It a...

Aristotle talks about “the first philosophy” throughout Metaphysics – and it is metaphysics that Aristotle considers to be the first philosophy – but he never makes it entirely clear what first philosophy consists of. What he does make clear is that the first philosophy is not to be understood as a collection of topics that should be studied in advance of any other topics. In fact, Aristotle se...

We look to mitonuclear ecology and the phenomenon of Mother’s Curse argue that sex parents offspring among populations eukaryotic organisms, as well mitochondrial genome, ought be taken into account in conceptualization evolutionary fitness. Subsequently, we show how characterizations fitness considered by philosophers do not take genome may suffer. Last, reflect on debate regarding fundamental...