What does it take for a theory of being to earn its ontological commitments, and can we make sense of nonexistence, properties, and possibility without bloating our inventory of what there is?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and is Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is well-known for his work in a variety of fields, but primarily metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action.
Check out his book, "Being: A Study in Ontology"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/44876
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192883968
2. Book Summary
Being: A Study in Ontology by Peter van Inwagen has a two-part aim: to lay out a meta-ontology (what we’re doing when we ask “What is there?” and how to answer it) and then to use that meta-ontology to do substantive ontology. He explicitly frames ontology as a systematic answer to “What is there?” and meta-ontology as reflection on the question and method; on his map of the book, Chapters I and V are meta-ontology, while II–IV (and VI) apply it to specific disputes. The meta-ontological stance is “deeply Quinean”: he’s willing to present it as (roughly) W. V. Quine’s view, sharply tied to how quantification works and how ontological commitment is extracted from what we accept.
With that Quinean methodology in hand, the middle of the book argues for several “anti-Quinean” ontological results (even while agreeing with Quine about non-existent things). In the Introduction he flags the central applications: whether there are things that “do not exist,” whether there are abstract objects, and whether modal discourse commits us to a realm of possibilities and possible worlds. On the abstract-object side, he pushes toward a picture in which properties and propositions are hard to avoid, and he develops a positive account of properties as “assertibles”: propositions are “saturated assertibles” (things that can be said, full stop) and properties are “unsaturated assertibles” (things that can be said of things). He then presses the consequences: if properties are assertibles, they are not literally “constituents” of concreta, and a lot of familiar metaphysical talk about properties (as parts, as perceivable constituents, as ontologically prior) is misguided. On the modal side, he shows how talk of truth, existence, and property-possession “in a world” can be handled by connecting worlds and possibilities tightly to propositions, rather than treating worlds as Lewis-style concrete “ways things could have been.”
The culminating move is Chapter VI’s “lightweight platonism,” which is meant to provide a single framework in which the earlier positions “can be placed.” In the book’s own summary, this is “lightweight” because the universals and other abstracta it accepts are causally inert: they have no causal powers and “explain nothing,” even if they can still figure in explanations the way numbers do in scientific reasoning. The result is a stark division of reality into (i) things that move and are moved, and (ii) things to which motion, causation, and change do not apply, with van Inwagen insisting that denying the second category would force him into contradiction given the commitments he thinks our best theorizing incurs.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:23 - Development of views
04:20 - Existence and being
07:51 - Technical vs. ordinary language
11:09 - Holes
14:18 - Paraphrase
20:17 - Negative existentials
22:19 - Fiction
29:05 - Having and holding
34:25 - Worry
39:20 - Attempt at paraphrase?
41:25 - Indefinable?
45:00 - Non-Meinongian paraphrase
51:03 - Platonism
53:56 - Fictionalism
58:16 - Effective theories
1:03:55 - Properties
1:08:25 - Modality
1:11:28 - Another approach
1:16:15 - Value of philosophy
1:17:36 - Conclusion
