Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame

Home

Search

Menu

Review

Home &rsaquo;<br>Reviews &rsaquo;<br>Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some

In this ambitious book, Fiocco defends two remarkable theses. The first is the claim that the world is ontologically flat, “that each thing is fundamental; that reality has no ontological levels and […] that no thing is grounded in or made to be by another” (xv). The second is a version of the presentist thesis that nothing exists that is not present. While promoting presentism itself is not all that remarkable, Fiocco tries to make an unusually strong case. Rather than appeal to common sense or philosophical intuition, he claims to provide irrefutable, knock-down arguments for both of his theses.

These knock-down arguments are said to emerge from Fiocco’s fundamentalist approach to metaphysics, which he calls “original inquiry”. This inquiry is occasioned by confronting the world (“all this”), and it aims to answer the question “What is all this?” without taking anything for granted. Such a presuppositionless inquiry is said to permit us to “move past stalemate in metaphysical discussions” (22) and to lead us to the undeniable truth about time and the world, which includes Fiocco’s two theses.

To make progress with original inquiry, Fiocco thinks that we first need to address the fundamental ontological question “What is a thing?” (11). As he clarifies, “a thing is just an entity, an existent, a being” (60). Many philosophers will doubt that anything interesting can be said about things, in this general sense, that goes beyond the trivial observation that things are whatever quantifiers range over and singular terms denote. Fiocco disagrees. For him, elucidating the notion of thinghood is the most important question in metaphysics, and what ultimately leads to his two main theses.

Original inquiry provides Fiocco with the theoretical framework for a rich and wide-ranging discussion that spans almost the entire breadth of contemporary metaphysics. There is far more material in this book than one can hope to cover in a short review. Instead of saying a little bit about many different topics, I think it might be more helpful to focus on Fiocco’s main arguments for his two theses, which are contained in two very short passages on p. 77 and p. 179, respectively. The nothing-explains-anything argument on p. 77 promotes a radical restriction on the possibility of explanation; the farrago argument on p. 179 advocates a novel objection to eternalist thesis that past, present, and future are equally real.

My plan for this review is to give a detailed exposition of these two pivotal arguments, plus a quick survey of the rest of the book.

No Thing Explains Any Thing (p. 77)

After spending the first seventy pages on a leisurely (and somewhat repetitive) exposition of original inquiry, Fiocco’s answer to the fundamental ontological question arises quite suddenly. On p. 73, he tells us that things are the ontological bases of explanations for the diversity in the world (“all this”). As it is given to us, the world is not uniform. The function of things is to explain this diversity. This might sound quite innocent, but the subsequent discussion reveals that Fiocco’s view is not that things can explain but that they must explain for them to count as things at all. It is not obvious how an original inquirer, who is not supposed to assume anything, arrives at this view. Why can’t there be terminal explananda that are explained by other things but do not explain anything themselves?

A few pages later, we discover that Fiocco holds a much more radical view. He does not merely deny the existence of terminal explananda, which would be the end points of chains of explanations, he claims that there cannot be any chains of explanation at all because no thing can be explained by any other thing:

If how an entity, e, [is] were explicable (in its entirety) in terms of some other thing, e itself would be ontologically idle, making no contribution per se to how the world is; such an “entity” would, if anything, merely be a manifestation of the latter, that genuine existent. Hence, if there were something that made e how “it” is, e’s contribution to how the world is would be made by that thing that wholly determines or makes e how e is. Yet if e “itself” were not capable of contributing to a partial explanation for how all this is as it is, if “it” per se were insufficient to do at least this, e would be no thing at all. “It” could in principle make no contribution to the world and, therefore, is literally, nothing. (77)

It is not immediately clear whether the view is that an explanatory redundant e cannot exist or that it cannot be a thing. This issue gets settled a little bit later, in Section 4.2, where Fiocco argues that the world is not a thing because all this is explained by all the things there...