Abstract

This is a dissertation about how the notion of metaphysical fundamentality can contribute to several outstanding problems in metaethics and elsewhere. It can, I argue, provide an adequate underpinning for the distinction between realist and irrealist theories, feature in a promising account of reference for realists, distinguish ordinary realist theories from quasi-realist Expressivism, and contribute to a defense of traditional non-naturalist views. By developing these fundamentality-based solutions, we also learn something about the notion of fundamentality itself; many of these solutions are most naturally implemented in a setting where fundamentality is understood as a primitive degreed notion, not susceptible to definition in other terms.