Person

Jonathan Schaffer

American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, working mainly in metaphysics and also in epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is best known for two contributions the codex draws on: the reorientation of metaphysics around the question of what grounds what, and the defense of Priority Monism, the view that the cosmos is the one fundamental concrete object and its parts are derivative.

Schaffer does not argue for theism, and the codex does not claim his support for theistic conclusions. His work matters here because it supplies a rigorous secular framework (grounding, fundamentality, the unity of the cosmos) inside which the cosmological question can be asked precisely.

Major works

• "Is There a Fundamental Level?" Noûs 37 (2003), a survey of the case for and against a fundamental level of reality.
• "On What Grounds What," in David Chalmers, David Manley and Ryan Wasserman, eds., Metametaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009), the programmatic case that metaphysics is chiefly about grounding rather than existence.
• "Monism: The Priority of the Whole," Philosophical Review 119 (2010), the leading defense of priority monism, including an argument from quantum entanglement.
• "The Internal Relatedness of All Things," Mind 119 (2010), arguing that pervasive internal relatedness supports the priority of the whole.
• With Jenann Ismael, "Quantum Holism: Nonseparability as Common Ground," Synthese 197 (2020), arguing that nonseparable quantum correlations are best explained by a more unified underlying reality.
• "Monism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2007, revised 2018).

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

The codex's engagement

• As a source of framework. Meta-Ontology and the Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism use Schaffer's grounding-first approach to frame the question of what the world ultimately depends on.
• As a steel-manned rival. The Unbroken Whole Argument takes Schaffer's priority monism as support for the unity of the world and treats the claim that the fundamental whole is simply brute as its main rival. The theist's reply is that being fundamental within the world is not the same as explaining the world's existence. See Priority Monism and Causal Principle.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• David John Chalmers, David Manley and Ryan Wasserman, Metametaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009). Open Library
• Jenann Ismael and Jonathan Schaffer, "Quantum holism: nonseparability as common ground," Synthese 197 (2020). doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1201-2
• Jonathan Schaffer, "Is There a Fundamental Level?" Noûs 37 (2003). doi:10.1111/1468-0068.00448
• Jonathan Schaffer, "On What Grounds What," Metametaphysics (2009). doi:10.1093/oso/9780199546046.003.0012
• J. Schaffer, "The Internal Relatedness of All Things," Mind 119 (2010). doi:10.1093/mind/fzq033
• Jonathan Schaffer, "Monism: The Priority of the Whole," The Philosophical Review 119 (2010). doi:10.1215/00318108-2009-025

See also

• Priority Monism, his central thesis
• Meta-Ontology, the grounding turn in metaphysics
• Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism, a theistic use of the grounding framework
• The Unbroken Whole Argument, a braided case that engages his monism
• One and the Many Problem, the ancient question his work renews