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Making Things Up (Paperback)
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Making Things Up (Paperback)
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A certain kind of talk is ubiquitous among both philosophers and
so-called "ordinary people": talk of one phenomenon generating or
giving rise to another, or talk of one phenomenon being based in or
constructed from another. For example, your computer screen is
built of atoms in a complex configuration, and the picture on the
screen is based in the local illumination of various individual
pixels. Karen Bennett calls the family of relations invoked by such
talk 'building relations'. Grounding is one currently popular such
relation; so too are composition, property realization,
and-controversially-causation. In chapters 2 and 3 Bennett argues
that despite their differences, building relations form an
interestingly unified family, and characterizes what all building
relations have in common. In chapter 4 she argues that it's a
mistake to think there is a strict divide between causal and
noncausal determination. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the connections
between building and fundamentality. Bennett argues at length that
both absolute and relative fundamentality are best understood in
terms of building, and that to say that one thing is more
fundamental than another is to say no more than that certain
patterns of building obtain. In chapter 7 Bennett argues that facts
about what builds what must be themselves built: if a builds b,
there is something in virtue of which that is the case. She also
argues that the answer is a itself. Finally, in chapter 8 she
defends an assumption that runs throughout the rest of the book,
namely that there indeed are nonfundamental, built entities. Doing
so involves substantive discussion about the scope of Ockham's
Razor. Bennett argues that some nonfundamentalia are among the
proper subject-matter of metaphysics, and thus that metaphysics is
not best understood as the study of the fundamental nature of
reality.
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