Why should we believe in ontological foundations?

Department of Philosophy colloquium

Many things depend on other things for their existence: wholes depend on their proper parts, effects depend on their causes. The question whether the chain of existential dependencies bottoms out somewhere in an ontological foundation of things that depend on no other things has attracted renewed attention in recent discussion. In this talk I will analyze three sets of arguments for the existence of an ontological foundation, classified as regress arguments, class arguments, and explanatory arguments. I will conclude that the justification for our belief in the existence of an ontological foundation remains elusive.