Ontology

Intermediate

Undergraduate level. These articles introduce the formal machinery, work through the standard results, and set out the main positions with the objections that stuck to them.

Quine's Criterion and 'On What There Is'Planned
To be is to be the value of a bound variable, and what that test does and does not settle
16 min
The Truthmaker Rival to Quine's CriterionPlanned
Reading commitment off what has to exist for a sentence to be true, rather than off what it quantifies over
17 min
Categories of BeingPlanned
Whether being divides into kinds, or applies in one single sense to everything there is
14 min
Drawing the Abstract/Concrete LinePlanned
Four ways of drawing the line, by causal power, location, mind dependence, and abstraction
15 min
Natural KindsPlanned
Whether the divisions we sort things into are found or made, and what a kind would have to be to be found
17 min
Mathematical Platonism and NominalismPlanned
The indispensability argument for numbers, and the nominalist strategies for doing without them
18 min
Fictional and Non-Existent ObjectsPlanned
Meinong on objects that bear properties without existing, and Russell's objections to them
17 min
Mereological CompositionPlanned
When some things compose a further thing, and the nihilist and universalist answers
18 min
Ontological Categories in Aristotle and HusserlPlanned
Substance and accident in the Categories, and Husserl's dependence relations between regions
19 min
Carnap's Internal and External QuestionsPlanned
Questions asked inside a framework against questions asked about it, and Quine's reply
24 min