While fights about ontology rage on in the ring, there's long been a suspicion whispered in
certain corners of the stadium that some of the fights aren't real. Granted the disputants all …

5o8 STEPHEN YABLO debate is futile and pointless. But they are also to some degree
independent, since a non-vacuous debate can still be futile and pointless, due, say, to a lack …

Gruber's work and that of other computer scientists led to the development of several formal
ontology languages. DARPA, for example, developed DAML (the DARPA Agent Markup …

The questions traditionally known as ontological have sometimes been summed up in the
deceptively simple interrogative:“What is there?” But this formulation is notoriously …

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 …

Tom Sawyer's trick of getting his friends to vie for the privilege of helping him whitewash the
fence made a big impression on me when I was a boy, and I have had great luck emulating …

Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make
up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics …

Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We
perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in …

A popular view in metaphysics is that which propositions are true depends upon how the
world is (see, for instance, Bigelow 1988; Lewis 1992; Sider 2001). In more evocative (as …

This paper defends the view that ontological questions (properly understood) are easy—too
easy, in fact, to be subjects of substantive and distinctively philosophical debates. They are …