A summary of Quine, W.V.O. “On What There Is.” The Review of Metaphysics 2.5 (1948): 21 – 38.
“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.” (Quine 1948: 21)
Quine seeks to diagnose the issue of ontological commitment and proceeds to view the issue through two perennial ontological debates: first, the problem of negative existentials, and secondly, the problem of universals. Quine introduces the idea of a conceptual scheme to analyze how ontological disputes arise in the first place.
rayndeon 