Difference and the Limit of Ground

Ask 'why?' of any fact and the answer invites the same question. Metaphysics has argued for decades, under the name of the well-foundedness debate, about whether the chain of grounds terminates. Foundationalists say it must end in ungrounded facts, infinitists deny it, and recent work adds exotic topologies, circles and loops, that fit neither camp. This chapter finds a possibility both sides have missed. At almost every conceivable stopping point, the question 'what grounds this?' still makes sense and simply goes unanswered. Explanation is declined, and the stopping point is brute. At exactly one stopping point the question loses its footing entirely, because nothing remains for it to grip. A state with no internal distinctions gives the grounding relation, which connects one thing to another in virtue of features, no features and no relata to work with. There, explanation is foreclosed. The chapter proves that undifferentiated being is the only terminus of this kind, and names the resulting position grounding limitarianism: the view that the hierarchy of grounds, if it ends, ends at the structural limit of the grounding relation's own applicability. The difference between a brute terminus and a foreclosing one is then priced against the strongest rival, Schaffer's view that the one fundamental thing is the whole structured cosmos. On the chapter's accounting, the brute foundationalist pays one intelligible unanswered question for every feature the terminus has, while the foreclosing terminus owes none. The chapter concedes that this comparison persuades only those who accept its measure of explanatory cost, and that the possibility of an undifferentiated state is a commitment entered on the framework's own invoice, to be weighed later in the book. The headline result holds on every branch of the disjunction: whether or not the chain of grounds ever ends, there was never nothing. That conclusion underwrites much of the theological critique that follows. This paper is Chapter 4 of Dyology: On Diversity and Equality; the terminus identified here is the state against which the book's theological chapters test every conception of God.