ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the idioms pertaining to ontological priority that are intended to help get a grip on the notion of fundamentality. It discusses whether priority ought to be conceptualized in terms of some kind of determination relation or rather in a form ontological dependence –a matter over which there seems to be a surprising amount of confusion in the literature. The chapter considers some issues pertaining to the level of ‘grain’ at which relations of priority ought to be conceptualized. Talk of the fundamental connotes a domain of entities somehow distinguished–and ‘distinguished’ in the sense of privileged–with respect to everything else. Largely responsible for the explosion of literature on fundamentality is the idea that supervenience and other purely modal concepts are insufficiently discriminating to do the work of characterizing the relations of priority defining the layered structure of reality.
