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Philosophers from Leibniz to John Heil have proposed the reduction/elimination of relations to non-relational features of their relata; essentially, they seek to formulate an ontology which does not contain relations as fundamental.

Presumably, with the modern excitement surrounding grounding, even those who reject ontologically fundamental relations might wish to utilise the so called metaphysical power of grounding.

I am looking for any articles/books that contain non-relational accounts of grounding. (Insofar as grounding is taken to be primitive, and some do not wish to admit relations into their ontology, some non-relational account of grounding will be needed).

So far my searches have come up dry.

Geoffrey Thomas
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BeingOfNothingness
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    Maybe I am missing something, but the traditional approach in analytic philosophy endorses ontology without any relations, fundamental or otherwise. Under Quine's criterion of ontological commitment, *to be is to be a value of a bound variable*, and in the favored first order logic one does not quantify over predicates. Relations are, therefore, replaced by linguistic devices. So if you want ontology without relations eliminativism is readily available, see [SEP's Logical form of grounding statements](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grounding/#LogForGroSta). – Conifold Jan 09 '19 at 09:53
  • This sections looks interesting - I'll take a look and refer back. – BeingOfNothingness Jan 09 '19 at 13:51
  • Any doctrine of Unity will be grounded without fundamental relations. Consider advaita (not-two) Vedanta. If there are not two things there can be no fundamental relations. The Perennial philosophy does not reify relations so you could look into advaita, Middle Way Buddhism, Sufism, Philosophical Taoism, Absolute Idealism and so forth. You're spoilt for choice. , . –  Jan 09 '19 at 14:22
  • Not necessarily. In a ontic framework comprising either universals or tropes, these are taken to be fundamental, even if there is a possible world which does not contain any. So we cannot reason from "there are not two things" to "there are no fundamental relations"; the entailment does not hold. But my issue is also not with denying ontologically fundamental relations. I am starting with an ontology that does not include them. My question regards what accounts of grounding are available that do not take it to be a relation. – BeingOfNothingness Jan 09 '19 at 14:42
  • @Conifold Grounding here still seems to be taken as a predicate, so in eliminativist accounts, grounding too would be eliminated from our ontology. If relations are taken only as linguistic devices, then grounding too would be a linguistic device, which would mean that it cannot do the metaphysical footwork we ask of it. Whilst many choose the minimal Quinean approach, it is not uncommon for people to posit universals, tropes and/or relations as the fundamental elements of our ontology (I say relations re: Ontic structuralism in metaphysics philosophy of science). – BeingOfNothingness Jan 09 '19 at 18:48
  • @Conifold For those who choose to reject the presence of relations, fundamental or otherwise, is there any account of metaphysical/ontological grounding in which grounding is construed in terms other than relations? (on Quinean frameworks, or with Tropes or Universals) Standardly, Grounding is taken as a determinative, sometimes constitutional and always supervening explanatory relation holding exclusively between facts. I would be fascinated, in an ontology without relations, how one might still include an account of grounding. – BeingOfNothingness Jan 09 '19 at 18:51
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    Well, SEP refers to Fine and [Correia](http://virthost.vub.ac.be/lnaweb/ojs/index.php/LogiqueEtAnalyse/article/download/1754/1531), whose paper seems pretty Quinean to me. But remember how non-chalante Quine is about metaphysics ("*bridge of our own making*", "*bringing together scettered sense events*"), so the "footwork" required is pretty pragmatic. Grounding is basically meant to replace supervenience, as in e.g. Davidson's anomalous monism about the mental, and that was always done at the linguistic level with mentalist vs physicalist predicates. – Conifold Jan 09 '19 at 20:27
  • I may be missing something, but if there are not two things there can be no fundamental relations. Thus a metaphysical doctrine of Unity reduces all relations. But I may be misconstruing the word 'grounding',here as you're using it. . –  Jan 12 '19 at 13:43

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