From First Mover to Threshold of Attribution: Regress, Priority, and Metaphysical Explanation

This paper argues that metaphysical regress need not terminate in a first entity, cause, or mover. The dominant inherited model, exemplified by first-mover and first-cause frameworks, assumes that the demand for termination must be satisfied by a first ontological term. I challenge that assumption. Drawing on the conceptual architecture of Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points (MARP), I propose that regress can terminate instead at a minimal threshold below which attribution itself collapses. On this view, what halts regress is not a first being within the order of explanation, but the limit beneath which comparison, predication, and explanatory continuation cease to be possible. The paper develops this claim by distinguishing ontological priority from attributive viability and by showing that logical and explanatory practices depend not on a fixed essence but on the preservation of sufficient continuity for return, comparison, and correction. The result is a reframing of metaphysical priority: termination is no longer understood as the discovery of a privileged first entity, but as arrival at the minimal condition required for attribution to remain intelligible at all.