The basic question of this article is whether Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of divine providence through his understanding of primary and secondary causation can be understood as a theological causal or non-causal explanation. To answer this question, I will consider some contemporary discussions about the nature of causal and non-causal explanations in philosophy of science and metaphysics, in order to integrate them into a theological discourse that appeals to the classical distinction between God as first cause and creatures as secondary causes to explain God's presence and providence in the created universe. My main argument will hold that, even if there are some philosophical models of explanation that seem to allow one to suggest that, at least partially, this doctrine could be seen as a non-causal theological explanation, there are other models that offer seemingly stronger reasons to see this doctrine in full as a causal theological explanation.

This article explores the concept of metaphysically opaque grounding, a largely neglected form of metaphysical grounding that challenges the commonly held assumptions that grounding is an especially intimate and powerful connection between facts and that it is necessarily connected with the essences of things. I provide a definition of opaque grounding, identify some interesting philosophical views that are committed to it, and explore some consequences for the general theory of grounding. Finally, I briefly address some natural initial doubts about opaque grounding and find them unwarranted. The upshot is that the notion deserves more attention than it has previously received.

There is a ubiquitous claim in the grounding literature that metaphysical foundationalism violates the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) in virtue of positing a level of ungrounded facts. I argue that foundationalists can accept the PSR if they are willing to replace fundamentality as independence with completeness and deny that ground is a strict partial order. The upshot is that the PSR can be compatible with both metaphysical foundationalism and metaphysical infinitism, and so presupposing this fixed explanatory demand need not beg the question in favour of either view.

Separatists about grounding take explanations to be separate from their corresponding grounding-facts. Grounding-facts are supposed to underlie, or back, such explanations. However, the backing relation hasn’t received much attention in the literature. The aim of this paper is to provide an informative definition of backing. First, I examine two prominent proposals: backing as explaining (Kovacs 2017; 2019a) and backing as grounding (see Sjölin Wirling 2020). Finally, I put forward my own proposal. I argue that under plausible assumptions about the role of backing and the nature of explanation, backing should be understood as a form of truthmaking, minimally construed.

This paper develops an account of metaphysical explanation according to which metaphysical explanations are answers to what-makes-it-the-case-that questions. On this view, metaphysical explanations are not to be considered entirely objective, but are subject to epistemic constraints imposed by the context in which a relevant question is asked. The resultant account of metaphysical explanation is developed independently of any particular views about grounding. Toward the end of the paper an application of the view is proposed that takes metaphysical explanations conceived in this way to characterize reality's structure. According to this proposal, reality's structure is partly constituted by a projection of our explanatory practices onto reality.