... Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, DB Terrell and Linda L. McAli... more ... Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, DB Terrell and Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge. ... “Conscious Beliefs and Desires: A Same-Order Approach”. In Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford, eds. Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. ...
The common thought that Husserl was committed to a Platonist ontology of essences, and to a myste... more The common thought that Husserl was committed to a Platonist ontology of essences, and to a mysterious epistemology that holds that we can ‘intuit’ these essences, has contributed substantially to his work being dismissed and marginalized in analytic philosophy. This paper aims to show that it is misguided to dismiss Husserl on these grounds. First, the author aims to explicate Husserl’s views about essences and how we can know them, in ways that make clear that he is not committed to a traditional Platonism, or a mystical epistemology. Second, the author argues that Husserl’s approach was an important source for Carnap in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”, where Carnap tried to overcome the empiricists’ qualms about referring to abstracta. Finally, the author will argue that Husserl’s approach can be reconstructed in contemporary analytic terms by appeal to the idea of pleonastic transformations. By seeing both Husserl’s views and their influences on later analytic work more clearly, the hope is to build bridges and make clear that the approach is of lasting value and interest.
Fictionalism has long presented an attractive alternative to both heavy-duty realist and simple e... more Fictionalism has long presented an attractive alternative to both heavy-duty realist and simple eliminativist views about entities such as properties, propositions, numbers, and possible worlds. More recently, a different alternative to these traditional views has been gaining popularity: a form of deflationism that holds that trivial arguments may lead us from uncontroversial premisses to conclude that the relevant entities exist � but where commitment to the entities is a trivial consequence of other claims we accept, not a posit to explain what makes the relevant claims true. The deflationist�s trivial arguments, however, have been attacked by fictionalists, who suggest that the ontological conclusions we get from these arguments should not be taken as serious ontological assertions at all, but rather as implicitly in the context of a fiction or simulation. This paper examines the fictionalist�s criticisms of �easy� arguments for numbers, properties, and other entities, and concludes that they beg the question against the deflationist and so do not undermine the deflationist�s position. Close attention to the argument also reveals a crucial disanalogy between overtly fictional discourse and discourse about numbers, properties, and so on, which undermines the case for fictionalism. Finally, I argue that the motivations for fictionalism (particularly those based in its ability to offer a good account of the discourse) are served as well or better by deflationism. Overall, this gives us reason to think that deflationism may provide a preferable approach for those looking for an alternative to both traditional realism and traditional eliminativism.
Neo-pragmatist approaches have been making a comeback lately in various local debates. Expressivi... more Neo-pragmatist approaches have been making a comeback lately in various local debates. Expressivist approaches to moral discourse have drawn increasing attention, and allied non-representational views of modal, logical, and even epistemic discourse have also been developed. Huw Price has argued for a form of global pragmatism, applied to all areas of discourse. But other defenders of local pragmatisms (such as Simon Blackburn) have denied that pragmatism can be extended globally, in part because it cannot be extended to everyday talk about ordinary objects. Here I examine the question: can a broadly pragmatist approach be extended to cover talk about ordinary objects? If so, what would this form of pragmatism look like, and what would the consequences be for ontology and metaontology?
This chapter makes the case that modal normativism also brings significant methodological advanta... more This chapter makes the case that modal normativism also brings significant methodological advantages. First, it can provide a much-needed justification of using intuitions, thought experiments, and a form of conceptual analysis, in answering metaphysical modal questions. Second, it provides a straightforward methodology for answering such questions—considered as “internal” questions—and gives reasons for thinking that some such questions are simply unanswerable. But such questions may also be addressed as external questions, where we are concerned not with what rules our terms do follow, but what rules they should follow, and what linguistic and conceptual schemes we should use. This gives us the means for understanding some debates about metaphysical modality as engaged in metalinguistic negotiation and conceptual engineering—and thereby preserving the idea that such debates may be deep and important.
Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin, Dec 31, 2015
espanolLos trabajos recientes de Stephen Schiffer en el desarrollo de una explicacion pleonastica... more espanolLos trabajos recientes de Stephen Schiffer en el desarrollo de una explicacion pleonastica de proposiciones (y de otras entidades) producen resultados importantes que cambian el significado tanto de la ontologia de primer orden como de la meta-ontologia. El objetivo del presente trabajo es dejar en claro cuales son estas consecuencias y por que son tan importantes. Segun mi punto de vista, la mayor amenaza para los partidarios de la metafisica proviene de un punto de vista que yo he llamado en otro trabajo el acercamiento «facil» a la ontologia: los argumentos de Schiffer a favor de proposiciones «pleonasticas», propiedades, estados, eventos y personajes ficticios; los argumentos neo-fregeanos a favor de la existencia de numeros; y mis propios argumentos a favor de objetos sociales, culturales, y personajes ficticios, y objetos ordinarios como mesas y sillas. El trabajo expande estas tres diferentes formas de ontologia facil, mostrando sus interrelaciones y argumenta que estos acercamientos nos dan un realismo ciento por ciento directo, sobre las entidades en cuestion. A un nivel meta-ontologico, sin embargo, el trabajo sugiere que el debate ontologico serio es confundido porque sus preguntas ontologicas tienen respuestas tan directas. Este acercamiento podria ser la amenaza mas importante para la metafisica seria, pero tambien es extremadamente prometedor como una manera de disolver misterios y clarificar la epistemologia de la metafisica EnglishStephen Schiffer’s recent work in developing a pleonastic account of propositions (and other entities) leads to major, game-changing results in both first-order ontology and meta-ontology. This paper aims to clarify what these consequences are and why they are so important. In my view, the biggest threat to the metaphysical party comes from a view I have elsewhere called the «easy» approach to ontology: Schiffer’s arguments for «pleonastic» propositions, properties, fictional characters, states and events; the neo-Fregean’s arguments for the existence of numbers; and my own arguments for fictional characters, social and cultural objects, and ordinary objects such as tables and chairs. The paper draws out these three different forms of easy ontology, showing their interrelations, and argues that these approaches really give us a straightforward, out and out realism about the entities in question. On the meta-ontological level however, it suggests that serious ontological debate in metaphysics is confused because its ontological questions have so straightforward answers. This approach may be the most important threat to serious metaphysics but it is also extremely promising as a way of dissolving mysteries and clarifying the epistemology of metaphysics.
Publisher Summary The reason artifacts have largely been neglected in analytic metaphysics over t... more Publisher Summary The reason artifacts have largely been neglected in analytic metaphysics over the past century or so are not difficult to unearth. The small portion of metaphysics that survived the positivist assault was that dedicated to serving as the handmaiden of the natural sciences by explicating their fundamental concepts—a role that left little room for undertaking metaphysics of artifacts and other objects of the social and human sciences. The idea that metaphysics could provide insight to what exists—not merely to the language and concepts—has been revived in post-Quinean metaphysics. Metaphysics is conceived of explicitly as of a piece with the natural sciences. Following Quine, those seeking to revive metaphysics have embraced the idea that the proper methods of determining an ontology involve determining what the best scientific theories (with physics as the paradigm) must quantify over. As long the “best scientific theories” are considered to include only those of the natural sciences, this method provides a more explicit ground for justifying the neglect by holding that one needs not accept artifacts and other social and cultural objects in the ontology.
Introduction: The Forgotten Easy Approach 1. The historical back story 2. The rise of neo-Quinean... more Introduction: The Forgotten Easy Approach 1. The historical back story 2. The rise of neo-Quineanism 3. The easy approach to ontology: a preliminary sketch 4. The plan of this book Part 1: Developing Easy Ontology 1) Whatever Happened to Carnapian Deflationism? 1. Carnap's approach to existence questions 2. Quine and the ascendency of ontology 3. Putnam takes deflationism on an unfortunate turn 4. 'Exists' as a formal notion: a brief history 5. Is Carnap committed to quantifier variance? 6. Conclusion 2) The Unbearable Lightness of Existence 1. A core rule of use for 'exists' 2. What are application conditions? 3. Do application conditions for 'K' include that Ks exist? 4. Answering existence questions easily 5. Against substantive criteria of existence 6. Lines of reply 3) Easy Ontology and its Consequences 1. Using trivial inferences to answer existence questions 2. Three forms of easy ontology 3. First result: simple realism 4. Second result: Meta-ontological deflationism 4) Other ways of being Suspicious 1. Denying that ontological disputes are genuine disputes 2. Denying that we can know the answers 3. Denying that there are answers to know 4. Understanding hard ontology 5) Fictionalism versus Deflationism 1. Motives for fictionalism 2. The fictionalist's case against easy arguments 3. A problem for the fictionalist's analogy 4. How the fictionalist incurs a debt 5. A reply for the fictionalist 6. The deflationary alternative 7. Conclusion Part II: Defending Easy Ontology 6) "Easy arguments give us problematic ontological commitments" 1. Unwanted ontological commitments? 2. Why easy arguments require no magic 3. Do we get the objects we wanted? 4. Conclusion 7) "Easy arguments rely on the questionable idea of conceptual truths" 1. Why easy ontology needs conceptual truths 2. Williamson's attack on epistemic analyticity 3. How easy inferences survive 4. Caveats and conclusions 8) "Easy arguments rely on principles that keep bad company" 1. The bad company challenge for the easy approach 2. Avoiding bad company 3. The limited impact of bad company objections 9) "The conclusions of easy arguments don't answer ontological questions" 1. Hofweber's solution to the puzzle about ontology 2. Focus and ontology 3. Ways to read the quantifier 10) "Hard ontological questions can be revived in Ontologese" 1. Existence questions in Ontologese 2. Just more metaphysics? 3. Avoiding the joint-carving quantifier 4. Problematizing the joint-carving quantifier Conclusion: The Importance of Not Being Earnest 1. The empirical, conceptual, and pragmatic case for deflationism 2. Metaphysics in a new key?
Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we cou... more Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we could come to know modal facts and metaphysical problems about how to place modal facts in the natural world. These problems arise from thinking of modal claims as attempts to describe modal features of this world that explain what makes them true. Here I propose a different view of modal discourse in which talk about what is “metaphysically necessary” does not aim to describe modal features of the world, but, rather, provides a particularly useful way of expressing constitutive semantic and conceptual rules in the object language. The result is a “modal normativist” view that enables us to avoid the epistemic problems of modality and mitigate the metaphysical worries, while also leaving open the possibility of a unified account of the function of modal language. Finally, I address a serious challenge: we have the norms we do in order to track the modal facts of the world, so that the order of explanation must go in the opposite direction. I close by showing how the normativist may answer that challenge.
Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanation... more Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanations and the social structures that figure in them. A chief virtue of the account is that it can show the importance of structural explanations while also respecting the role of individual autonomy in explaining many decisions, by demonstrating the way in which social structures may set up a ‘choice architecture’ in which these choices are made. This paper gives an overview of this achievement, and goes on to consider why there may be need to broaden the role of social structural explanations beyond those that involve explicit choice within a choice architecture. It develops the idea, familiar from work by Heidegger and Ingarden, that social artifacts, roles, and nodes in social structures may be constitutively defined by norms. It closes by suggesting that attention to the role of norms in social structures may enable us to broaden the account to include structural explanations of other kinds.
... Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, DB Terrell and Linda L. McAli... more ... Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, DB Terrell and Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge. ... “Conscious Beliefs and Desires: A Same-Order Approach”. In Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford, eds. Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. ...
The common thought that Husserl was committed to a Platonist ontology of essences, and to a myste... more The common thought that Husserl was committed to a Platonist ontology of essences, and to a mysterious epistemology that holds that we can ‘intuit’ these essences, has contributed substantially to his work being dismissed and marginalized in analytic philosophy. This paper aims to show that it is misguided to dismiss Husserl on these grounds. First, the author aims to explicate Husserl’s views about essences and how we can know them, in ways that make clear that he is not committed to a traditional Platonism, or a mystical epistemology. Second, the author argues that Husserl’s approach was an important source for Carnap in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”, where Carnap tried to overcome the empiricists’ qualms about referring to abstracta. Finally, the author will argue that Husserl’s approach can be reconstructed in contemporary analytic terms by appeal to the idea of pleonastic transformations. By seeing both Husserl’s views and their influences on later analytic work more clearly, the hope is to build bridges and make clear that the approach is of lasting value and interest.
Fictionalism has long presented an attractive alternative to both heavy-duty realist and simple e... more Fictionalism has long presented an attractive alternative to both heavy-duty realist and simple eliminativist views about entities such as properties, propositions, numbers, and possible worlds. More recently, a different alternative to these traditional views has been gaining popularity: a form of deflationism that holds that trivial arguments may lead us from uncontroversial premisses to conclude that the relevant entities exist � but where commitment to the entities is a trivial consequence of other claims we accept, not a posit to explain what makes the relevant claims true. The deflationist�s trivial arguments, however, have been attacked by fictionalists, who suggest that the ontological conclusions we get from these arguments should not be taken as serious ontological assertions at all, but rather as implicitly in the context of a fiction or simulation. This paper examines the fictionalist�s criticisms of �easy� arguments for numbers, properties, and other entities, and concludes that they beg the question against the deflationist and so do not undermine the deflationist�s position. Close attention to the argument also reveals a crucial disanalogy between overtly fictional discourse and discourse about numbers, properties, and so on, which undermines the case for fictionalism. Finally, I argue that the motivations for fictionalism (particularly those based in its ability to offer a good account of the discourse) are served as well or better by deflationism. Overall, this gives us reason to think that deflationism may provide a preferable approach for those looking for an alternative to both traditional realism and traditional eliminativism.
Neo-pragmatist approaches have been making a comeback lately in various local debates. Expressivi... more Neo-pragmatist approaches have been making a comeback lately in various local debates. Expressivist approaches to moral discourse have drawn increasing attention, and allied non-representational views of modal, logical, and even epistemic discourse have also been developed. Huw Price has argued for a form of global pragmatism, applied to all areas of discourse. But other defenders of local pragmatisms (such as Simon Blackburn) have denied that pragmatism can be extended globally, in part because it cannot be extended to everyday talk about ordinary objects. Here I examine the question: can a broadly pragmatist approach be extended to cover talk about ordinary objects? If so, what would this form of pragmatism look like, and what would the consequences be for ontology and metaontology?
This chapter makes the case that modal normativism also brings significant methodological advanta... more This chapter makes the case that modal normativism also brings significant methodological advantages. First, it can provide a much-needed justification of using intuitions, thought experiments, and a form of conceptual analysis, in answering metaphysical modal questions. Second, it provides a straightforward methodology for answering such questions—considered as “internal” questions—and gives reasons for thinking that some such questions are simply unanswerable. But such questions may also be addressed as external questions, where we are concerned not with what rules our terms do follow, but what rules they should follow, and what linguistic and conceptual schemes we should use. This gives us the means for understanding some debates about metaphysical modality as engaged in metalinguistic negotiation and conceptual engineering—and thereby preserving the idea that such debates may be deep and important.
Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin, Dec 31, 2015
espanolLos trabajos recientes de Stephen Schiffer en el desarrollo de una explicacion pleonastica... more espanolLos trabajos recientes de Stephen Schiffer en el desarrollo de una explicacion pleonastica de proposiciones (y de otras entidades) producen resultados importantes que cambian el significado tanto de la ontologia de primer orden como de la meta-ontologia. El objetivo del presente trabajo es dejar en claro cuales son estas consecuencias y por que son tan importantes. Segun mi punto de vista, la mayor amenaza para los partidarios de la metafisica proviene de un punto de vista que yo he llamado en otro trabajo el acercamiento «facil» a la ontologia: los argumentos de Schiffer a favor de proposiciones «pleonasticas», propiedades, estados, eventos y personajes ficticios; los argumentos neo-fregeanos a favor de la existencia de numeros; y mis propios argumentos a favor de objetos sociales, culturales, y personajes ficticios, y objetos ordinarios como mesas y sillas. El trabajo expande estas tres diferentes formas de ontologia facil, mostrando sus interrelaciones y argumenta que estos acercamientos nos dan un realismo ciento por ciento directo, sobre las entidades en cuestion. A un nivel meta-ontologico, sin embargo, el trabajo sugiere que el debate ontologico serio es confundido porque sus preguntas ontologicas tienen respuestas tan directas. Este acercamiento podria ser la amenaza mas importante para la metafisica seria, pero tambien es extremadamente prometedor como una manera de disolver misterios y clarificar la epistemologia de la metafisica EnglishStephen Schiffer’s recent work in developing a pleonastic account of propositions (and other entities) leads to major, game-changing results in both first-order ontology and meta-ontology. This paper aims to clarify what these consequences are and why they are so important. In my view, the biggest threat to the metaphysical party comes from a view I have elsewhere called the «easy» approach to ontology: Schiffer’s arguments for «pleonastic» propositions, properties, fictional characters, states and events; the neo-Fregean’s arguments for the existence of numbers; and my own arguments for fictional characters, social and cultural objects, and ordinary objects such as tables and chairs. The paper draws out these three different forms of easy ontology, showing their interrelations, and argues that these approaches really give us a straightforward, out and out realism about the entities in question. On the meta-ontological level however, it suggests that serious ontological debate in metaphysics is confused because its ontological questions have so straightforward answers. This approach may be the most important threat to serious metaphysics but it is also extremely promising as a way of dissolving mysteries and clarifying the epistemology of metaphysics.
Publisher Summary The reason artifacts have largely been neglected in analytic metaphysics over t... more Publisher Summary The reason artifacts have largely been neglected in analytic metaphysics over the past century or so are not difficult to unearth. The small portion of metaphysics that survived the positivist assault was that dedicated to serving as the handmaiden of the natural sciences by explicating their fundamental concepts—a role that left little room for undertaking metaphysics of artifacts and other objects of the social and human sciences. The idea that metaphysics could provide insight to what exists—not merely to the language and concepts—has been revived in post-Quinean metaphysics. Metaphysics is conceived of explicitly as of a piece with the natural sciences. Following Quine, those seeking to revive metaphysics have embraced the idea that the proper methods of determining an ontology involve determining what the best scientific theories (with physics as the paradigm) must quantify over. As long the “best scientific theories” are considered to include only those of the natural sciences, this method provides a more explicit ground for justifying the neglect by holding that one needs not accept artifacts and other social and cultural objects in the ontology.
Introduction: The Forgotten Easy Approach 1. The historical back story 2. The rise of neo-Quinean... more Introduction: The Forgotten Easy Approach 1. The historical back story 2. The rise of neo-Quineanism 3. The easy approach to ontology: a preliminary sketch 4. The plan of this book Part 1: Developing Easy Ontology 1) Whatever Happened to Carnapian Deflationism? 1. Carnap's approach to existence questions 2. Quine and the ascendency of ontology 3. Putnam takes deflationism on an unfortunate turn 4. 'Exists' as a formal notion: a brief history 5. Is Carnap committed to quantifier variance? 6. Conclusion 2) The Unbearable Lightness of Existence 1. A core rule of use for 'exists' 2. What are application conditions? 3. Do application conditions for 'K' include that Ks exist? 4. Answering existence questions easily 5. Against substantive criteria of existence 6. Lines of reply 3) Easy Ontology and its Consequences 1. Using trivial inferences to answer existence questions 2. Three forms of easy ontology 3. First result: simple realism 4. Second result: Meta-ontological deflationism 4) Other ways of being Suspicious 1. Denying that ontological disputes are genuine disputes 2. Denying that we can know the answers 3. Denying that there are answers to know 4. Understanding hard ontology 5) Fictionalism versus Deflationism 1. Motives for fictionalism 2. The fictionalist's case against easy arguments 3. A problem for the fictionalist's analogy 4. How the fictionalist incurs a debt 5. A reply for the fictionalist 6. The deflationary alternative 7. Conclusion Part II: Defending Easy Ontology 6) "Easy arguments give us problematic ontological commitments" 1. Unwanted ontological commitments? 2. Why easy arguments require no magic 3. Do we get the objects we wanted? 4. Conclusion 7) "Easy arguments rely on the questionable idea of conceptual truths" 1. Why easy ontology needs conceptual truths 2. Williamson's attack on epistemic analyticity 3. How easy inferences survive 4. Caveats and conclusions 8) "Easy arguments rely on principles that keep bad company" 1. The bad company challenge for the easy approach 2. Avoiding bad company 3. The limited impact of bad company objections 9) "The conclusions of easy arguments don't answer ontological questions" 1. Hofweber's solution to the puzzle about ontology 2. Focus and ontology 3. Ways to read the quantifier 10) "Hard ontological questions can be revived in Ontologese" 1. Existence questions in Ontologese 2. Just more metaphysics? 3. Avoiding the joint-carving quantifier 4. Problematizing the joint-carving quantifier Conclusion: The Importance of Not Being Earnest 1. The empirical, conceptual, and pragmatic case for deflationism 2. Metaphysics in a new key?
Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we cou... more Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we could come to know modal facts and metaphysical problems about how to place modal facts in the natural world. These problems arise from thinking of modal claims as attempts to describe modal features of this world that explain what makes them true. Here I propose a different view of modal discourse in which talk about what is “metaphysically necessary” does not aim to describe modal features of the world, but, rather, provides a particularly useful way of expressing constitutive semantic and conceptual rules in the object language. The result is a “modal normativist” view that enables us to avoid the epistemic problems of modality and mitigate the metaphysical worries, while also leaving open the possibility of a unified account of the function of modal language. Finally, I address a serious challenge: we have the norms we do in order to track the modal facts of the world, so that the order of explanation must go in the opposite direction. I close by showing how the normativist may answer that challenge.
Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanation... more Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanations and the social structures that figure in them. A chief virtue of the account is that it can show the importance of structural explanations while also respecting the role of individual autonomy in explaining many decisions, by demonstrating the way in which social structures may set up a ‘choice architecture’ in which these choices are made. This paper gives an overview of this achievement, and goes on to consider why there may be need to broaden the role of social structural explanations beyond those that involve explicit choice within a choice architecture. It develops the idea, familiar from work by Heidegger and Ingarden, that social artifacts, roles, and nodes in social structures may be constitutively defined by norms. It closes by suggesting that attention to the role of norms in social structures may enable us to broaden the account to include structural explanations of other kinds.
In the decades following Quine, debates about existence have taken center stage in the metaphysic... more 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 proliferation of positions and lack of any clear idea of how to resolve debates. The most prominent challenge to mainstream ontological debates has come from the idea that disputants can be seen as using the quantifier with different meanings, leaving the dispute merely verbal. Nearly all of the work in defense of hard ontology has gone into arguing against quantifier variance.
This volume argues that hard ontology faces an entirely different challenge, which remains even if the threat of quantifier variance can be avoided. The challenge comes from the 'easy approach to ontology': a view that is arguably the heir to Carnap's own position. The idea of the easy approach is that many ontological questions can be answered by undertaking trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises, making prolonged disputes about the questions out of place. This book aims to develop the easy approach to ontology, showing how it leads to both a first-order simple realism about the disputed entities and a form of meta-ontological deflationism that takes ontological disputes themselves to be misguided, since existence questions may be answered by straightforward conceptual and/or empirical work. It also aims to defend the easy approach against a range of arguments wielded against it and to show it to be a viable and attractive alternative to the quagmire of hard ontology.
Readership: The main audience will be professionals and graduate students in philosophy. The book should also be accessible to advanced undergraduates with background in metaphysics, and usable in undergraduate and graduate metaphysics courses.
Uploads
Papers by Amie Thomasson
This volume argues that hard ontology faces an entirely different challenge, which remains even if the threat of quantifier variance can be avoided. The challenge comes from the 'easy approach to ontology': a view that is arguably the heir to Carnap's own position. The idea of the easy approach is that many ontological questions can be answered by undertaking trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises, making prolonged disputes about the questions out of place. This book aims to develop the easy approach to ontology, showing how it leads to both a first-order simple realism about the disputed entities and a form of meta-ontological deflationism that takes ontological disputes themselves to be misguided, since existence questions may be answered by straightforward conceptual and/or empirical work. It also aims to defend the easy approach against a range of arguments wielded against it and to show it to be a viable and attractive alternative to the quagmire of hard ontology.
Readership: The main audience will be professionals and graduate students in philosophy. The book should also be accessible to advanced undergraduates with background in metaphysics, and usable in undergraduate and graduate metaphysics courses.