In an amusing opening to his influential paper “On What there Is,” Quine writes: “A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.” The curious thing about this opening, is that it is so very far from Russell’s views on the nature of ontology. Russell’s ontological development has been the subject of rebuke from Broad who, perhaps in jest, accused him of being a flighty philosopher for publishing a new system of philosophy every few years. Quine’s penchant for desert landscapes, his feeling that intensional entities are “creatures of darkness,” might be placed in contrast to the many denizens of Russell’s different ontological theories over the years— non-existents such as Pegasus, classes, propositions, denoting concepts, negative facts, general facts. Yet it is Russell, not Quine, who is responsible for making logic the central component in questions of ontology. The importance of the new quantificational logic developed by Frege and Russell shows up surreptitiously when Quine cagily answers “Everything” to the question “What is there? ” Russell set forth the connection between ontology and quantification long before Quine coined the maxim To be is to be the value of a variable ...
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