Ockham on Priority and Posteriority

Does William Ockham believe in a metaphysical form of grounding? In particular, does Aristotelian natural priority (as Ockham understands it) qualify as a kind of metaphysical grounding? I offer a close analysis of Ockham’s texts, and I suggest that the answer is probably no. In the course of my analysis, I show that Ockham sparks a debate about priority that was taken up by other fourteenth century thinkers, and I show that Ockham’s view is striking because he so sharply separates natural priority and causal priority. Unlike certain other scholastics who understand natural priority as a kind of dependence, Ockham insists that natural priority is entirely non-causal, and qua natural priority, it involves no dependence between the entities involved. This leads Ockham to deny that natural priority applies to certain cases which otherwise might count as standard candidates.