The Abstract and the Concrete : Further Essays in Ontology

The Abstract and the Concrete draws together Peter Van Inwagen's essays in ontology from the last decade. They range over topics in meta-ontology, the author's distinctive version of platonism, mathematical fictionalism, analyticity, and colour.

The Abstract and the Concrete presents nine essays in ontology by Peter van Inwagen. Three of the essays concern topics in meta-ontology: the idea of multiple modes of being; Carnap''s idea that the questions of "ontology," insofar as they are meaningful at all, are questions about which linguistic frameworks it is expedient to employ; the concept of one object''s being metaphysically more fundamental that another. Three of the essays concern various topics that pertain to the author''s "lower-case" or "lightweight" platonism. (According to lightweight platonism, there are attributes-necessarily existent universals. These attributes are not constituents of substances, they cannot enter into causal relations, and it is false that an F object is F in virtue of instantiating the attribute of being F.) The remaining three essays examine proposed answers to particular ontological questions: the question of the validity of mathematical fictionalism; the question whether it is analytic that at any place at which some xs are arranged chairwise, there is there a chair; the question of what it means to say that colour is an illusion, and whether (in the sense determined) colour is an illusion.