Metaontology

Advanced

Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open, with the primary literature named rather than gestured at.

Epistemicism About MetaphysicsPlanned
Bennett's diagnosis that some disputes are substantive but unsettleable, through difference-minimising and burden-shifting
23 min
Ontological Anti-RealismPlanned
Chalmers on lightweight and heavyweight quantifiers and the method of elimination for verbal disputes
24 min
Hofweber and InternalismPlanned
Two readings of the quantifier, the puzzle about ontology, and internalism about arithmetic
24 min
FiguralismPlanned
Yablo's claim that existence talk about numbers is often figurative, and why that makes ontology quizzical
23 min
Pragmatism After CarnapPlanned
Price's subject naturalism, global expressivism, and the case for asking what existence talk does
24 min
Modal NormativismPlanned
Thomasson's proposal that necessity claims express semantic rules rather than describe modal facts
22 min
Ontological NihilismPlanned
Hawthorne, Cortens, and Turner on describing the world with no objects at all, using feature-placing and predicate functors
25 min
Neutralism About QuantificationPlanned
Azzouni's ontologically innocent quantifier and the ontological independence criterion for existence
23 min
NoneismPlanned
Routley and Priest's modern Meinongianism, the characterisation principle, and objects that exist at impossible worlds
24 min
Necessitism and ContingentismPlanned
Williamson's claim that necessarily everything is necessarily something, and the merely possible as non-concrete
25 min
Just-Is StatementsPlanned
Rayo's compositionalism, trivialism about mathematics, and the construction of logical space
24 min
Thin ObjectsPlanned
Linnebo's sufficiency of abstraction, reconceptualisation, and dynamic abstraction as a cure for bad company
25 min
Maximalism and PlenitudePlanned
Eklund's maximalism and the principle that every consistent kind of object there could be there is
23 min
The Question of OntologyPlanned
Fine's argument that ontological claims are not existence claims and his reality operator
24 min
Permissivism and Ordered OntologyPlanned
Schaffer's neo-Aristotelian view that existence questions are trivial and the real work is what grounds what
24 min
Theoretical EquivalencePlanned
When two theories say the same thing: definitional and Morita equivalence and notational variants
25 min
Ontic Structural RealismPlanned
Ladyman and Ross's rainforest realism, real patterns, and the claim that structure is all there is
25 min
The Epistemic Challenge to MetaphysicsPlanned
Whether theoretical virtues can be truth-conducive in metaphysics, and Kriegel on aesthetic virtues
22 min