Making Things Up

Karen Bennett's book defends the layered picture of reality: some things are more fundamental than others. And as a book in metaphysics, it takes these layers to be of metaphysical significance. But contrary to what others sympathetic to this picture would say, metaphysics is not distinctly concerned with the bottom layer—what is most fundamental—nor is there a single notion of priority that underlies this layered structure, as those would have it who believe that a single relation of metaphysical grounding gives rise to the layers. Instead, metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental as well as the nonfundamental, and as opposed to a single grounding relation we have a family of “building relations.” Being more fundamental than is to be understood in terms of building relations, as the obtaining of a somewhat complicated condition on such relations. And building relations, in turn, are understood as a unified class of relations that...