Title: Fundamentality and Humean Laws of Ground

Abstract: What grounds facts of ground? Some metaphysicians invoke fundamental grounding laws to answer this question. These are general principles that link grounded facts to their grounds. The main business of this talk is to advance the debate about the metaphysics of grounding laws by exploring the prospects of a plausible yet underexplored Humean account. In the positive part, I articulate such a novel view and argue for its merits. This view shuns essences and takes laws to be unmysterious elite regularities. Therefore, it is a promising alternative for theorists of ground who demur the acceptance of essentialism about grounding laws but nonetheless think that these are needed in our theorizing. In the negative part, I argue that widely accepted principles of ground and Humeanism jeopardize the fundamentality of the grounding laws. I discuss two immediately available and prima facie appealing strategies to evade this threat. I show that both have undesirable theoretical costs. However, I conclude with an optimistic take: by rejecting an orthodox principle that links partial and full grounds, we can recover the fundamentality of Humean grounding laws.