ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part explores ground’s connections to analyticity. It discusses the claim that ground and causation present a unified phenomenon. The part offers a brief sketch of theories of emergence and notes that the literature contains little explicit discussion of the relationship between the two relations. It considers various proposals from the literature on how ground and essence are related. These include reductive proposals: reductions of essence to ground, reductions of ground to essence, and reductions of both to a third party. The part discusses the notion of fundamentality as it is commonly articulated in the ground framework. It explores the ways in which questions of ground are related to questions of realism and ground’s connections to structure (joint-carving, naturalness). The part discusses how ground and truthmaking might be related.
