Being, more or less: Understanding the structure of the world in terms of degrees of being

In the past few decades, metaphysicians have shown a great interest in the notion of fundamentality and the hierarchical structure of the world. As a result, we now have an extensive body of literature attending to the notion of fundamentality. This addresses what is meant by being fundamental, the nature of relations of fundamentality, the kinds of such relations, and how the world is structured by these relations. However, there is still a central question that has been left neglected for a large part of the literature: what makes (or constitutes) one thing more, or less, fundamental than another?

One of the main reasons for the lack of substantial work in regard to this question is that many philosophers of fundamentality take this notion to be primitive, and therefore not in need of explanation; as Jessica Wilson says, "Fundamental is, well, fundamental." (2014: 560) In this thesis, I reject this approach and argue that the relative fundamentality of entities in relation to other entities (or what I call the "metaphysical status of entities") can be explained in terms of degrees of being. I take an ontological approach in explaining the way the world is structured because 'being' and its features (such as degrees) are the only metaphysical notion that are truly primitive.

In Chapter 1 I offer a brief exposition of the literature on fundamentality, explaining what is meant by fundamentality as well as the ways we characterise this notion, i.e. "absolute" and "relative" fundamentality. In this chapter, I explain the fruitfulness of theories of fundamentality in explaining the structure of the world, and at the end, I pose the aforementioned question: what makes something fundamental (or more or less fundamental than another)? My answer to this question is a meta-ontological one, so I first need to explain what I mean by being (or existence), which is the focus of Chapter 2. In this chapter, I discuss the benefits and shortcomings of two major meta-ontological views: equivocality of being (i.e. existence has a variety of senses) and univocality of being (i.e. there is only one sense to existence). I demonstrate that neither of these views is sufficient in accounting for how things exist, so in Chapter 3, I embark on the task of offering an alternative view, which is the theory of degrees of being. This version of the theory of degrees of being takes existence to have one sense, the referent of which comes in degrees, corresponding to different kinds of being. In Chapter 4 I make the connection between this purely meta-ontological theory and entities in the world. I argue in this chapter that reality is the manifestation of existence and as such things come in degrees of reality. I demonstrate this view in terms of the concrete-abstract divide as well as the actual-potential one. Finally, in Chapter 5 I return to the original question posed at the end of the first chapter, arguing that to be more fundamental than another entity is directly connected to the degree of being something enjoys. I also hold up my version of the theory of degrees of being to two of the strongest rival views (i.e. David Lewis' naturalness and Karen Bennett's building) to show that my version of the theory of degrees of being is a worthy addition, and indeed a powerful challenge, to existing theories of fundamentality.