AN EXAMINATION OF THE NOTION OF FUNDAMENTALITY WITH A DEVELOPED APPLICATION TO PHENOMENOLOGY
Date
2025-05
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In this paper I examine various notions and contexts of fundamentality. This exploration
of fundamentality is intended to map out some of its more unfamiliar notions and observe how
our understanding of what is fundamental shifts in different contexts. In the first chapter, the
contexts I examine fundamentality in include the metaphysical context and conceptual context,
from which I map out the different notions of fundamentality that appear in each context. In the
second chapter, these contexts and notions are explored through the works of various
philosophers beginning with analytical philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Theodore
Sider, and ending with non-analytic philosophers, particularly the French philosophers Henri
Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The third chapter utilizes the understanding of how the
notions and contexts of fundamentality shift throughout different philosophical works to apply it
to Merleau-ponty’s phenomenological worldview, mainly working off the philosophy from his
book Phenomenology Of Perception. This chapter concludes with mapping out a novel notion
of fundamentality that allows us to understand and posit what is fundamental within the context
of phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty presents, granting a novel understanding to how
fundamentality works with his worldview.