Grounding and the Work of Philosophy

Some think that the notion of grounding is unhelpful or inappropriate for understanding philosophy or its history. This idea is expressed in this volume’s chapter by Sosseh Assaturian and Rachel O’Keefe. They claim that since the nature of grounding is highly controversial, appealing to the notion is unhelpful for illuminating historical positions. They also claim that the thematization of grounding is a recent phenomenon and infer from this that describing historical views in terms of grounding is anachronistic. This chapter argues for the rejection of both claims. The first would prove too much, for various other notions that have long been centrally important in philosophical discourse are controversial in similar ways. The second is also dubious: various philosophers of the past have carefully theorized notions that historically give rise to the notion of grounding and exhibit the properties nowadays most commonly agreed to belong to grounding. The chapter concludes with a description of the ground-theoretic conception of philosophy advocated by those past thinkers.