1. Introduction: Grounding Then and Now (Magali Roques) -- 2. Ontological Priority and Grounding in Aristotle’s Categories (Riin Sirkel) -- 3. Grounding and Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Petter Sandstad) -- 4. Ground in Avicenna’s Logic (Paul Thom) -- 5. Abelard on Grounding in Ontology and Logic (Christopher J. Martin) -- 6. Grounding Medieval Consequence (Jacob W. Archambault) -- 7. Does a Stone Make Itself Heavy? A Thirteenth-Century Problem about the Causation of Proper and Inseparable Accidents (Simona Vucu) -- 8. Ockham on Priority and Posteriority (JT Paasch) -- 9. William of Ockham on Essential Dependence and Causation (Magali Roques) -- 10. The Incoherence of Ockham’s Ethics (Thomas M. Ward) -- 11. Up in the Air: Buridan’s Principled Rejection of Grounding (Calvin G. Normore) -- 12. Valid on Formal Grounds (Mikko Yrjönsuuri) -- 13. Two Kinds of Grounding? Suárez on Natural Resultance and Foundation (Stephan Schmid) -- 14. Some Work for a Theory of Grounding? (Ricki Bliss).

This book offers a selection of 13 case studies on how the notion of grounding helps illuminate philosophical discussions of our past with a special focus on debates of the Middle Ages. It thereby makes not only the case that the notion of grounding, which has become so widely debated in analytic metaphysics, has a long and venerable tradition, but also shows that this tradition has a lot to teach to contemporary philosophers of grounding. This is because the historical authors discussed in this volume – that is, Aristotle, Fazang, Boethius, Avicenna, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Suárez, Leibniz, and others – suggested different types of non-efficient-causal explanations which are to be carefully distinguished. This volume illustrates how philosophy and history of philosophy can be mutually illuminating by showing that the terminology developed in the contemporary debate about grounding can help reconstruct philosophical discussions from Antiquity up to the Early Modern Period, and that these very discussions enrich, and in part challenge the contemporary debate about grounding. In this vein, it is an important reading for everyone interested in the history of grounding and the philosophical insights that this history might have left to us.