In the decades following Quine, debates about existence have taken center stage in the
metaphysics. But neo-Quinean ontology has reached a crisis point, given the endless …

The Fragmentation of Being offers answers to some of the most fundamental questions in
ontology. There are many kinds of beings but are there also many kinds of being? The world …

Are there objects that are" thin" in the sense that not very much is required for their
existence? Frege famously thought so. He claimed that the equinumerosity of the knives and …

In, Peter van Inwagen asked a good question.(Asking the right question is often the hardest
part.) He asked: what do you have to do to some objects to get them to compose something …

Eli Hirsch has contributed steadily to metaphysics since his ground-breaking (and much
cited) work on identity through time (culminating in the 1982 OUP book The Concept of …

What is the relationship between a clay statue and the lump of clay from which it is formed?
We might say that the lump constitutes the statue, but what is this relation of material …

I am attracted to ontologica! pluralism, the doctrine that some things exist in a different way
than other things. 1 For the ontological pluralist, there is more to learn about an object's …

According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other
inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties …

Can there be objects that are 'thin'in the sense that very little is required for their existence?
A number of philosophers have thought so. For instance, many Fregeans believe it suffices …

Neo-Fregeans say that a definition by abstraction (eg 'the direction of line 1= the direction of
line 2 iff lines 1 and 2 are parallel')'reconceptualizes' its subject matter (talk of parallelism …