The Relational Turn: A New Foundation for All Philosophical Domains

This paper introduces a structurally grounded foundation for philosophy that replaces the discipline’s inherited conceptual primitives—objects, minds, meanings, reasons, and values—with a unified relational framework. It argues that many of philosophy’s most persistent problems arise not from features of reality but from treating these historical categories as metaphysical anchors. By beginning with relational structure rather than with assumed primitives, the paper dissolves classical debates such as the mind–body problem, the nature of normativity, the status of meaning, and the metaphysics of causation and time.The relational foundation presented here is conceptually minimal yet explanatorily maximal. It reframes objects as compressions of stable relational patterns, consciousness as orientation within a structure, causation as directional constraint propagation, meaning as emergent relational stability, and time as continuity of orientation. This framework unifies philosophical domains and aligns them with contemporary developments in cognitive science, physics, systems theory, and information dynamics.The relational turn is not a revision of existing debates but a replacement of the conceptual architecture that made those debates appear necessary. It offers a coherent, integrated, and structurally justified foundation for future philosophical inquiry.