Ontology Made Easy By Amie L. Thomasson.

Abstract

The expressed aim of this engaging book is to side with Carnap in his famous debate with Quine on ‘ontology’ and promote an ‘easy ontology’ deflationist thesis (4, 11, 23). Accepting Quine’s remark that he is no friend of traditional metaphysics (49), Thomasson says that sociological factors (53) produced a neo-Quinean sea change (23) that has left us with a morass of hard ontology (12). Thomasson’s easy ontology hopes to make philosophical ontology trivial and enable metaphysics to move on to the important work on grounding, fundamentality, the gunk of priority monism and so on (325). It should be noted that it is the early Putnam, not Quine (17), who argued that the successful practice of empirical science warrants a metaphysical realism concerning numbers, classes and the like – given they are indispensable to the most empirically corroborated ‘total theory’ with the best theoretical virtues. Are they indispensable? That remains to be seen. But the sea-change Thomasson abhors is not found here. More plausibly it originates with Lewis and Kripke with their respective possible worlds, counterparts, mereological sums and ‘analytic’ metaphysical necessities knowable a posteriori. Quine thought modal logic to be an anti-scientific throwback to Aristotelian essentialism.