Abstract

Ontology played a very large role in Quine’s philosophy and was one of his major preoccupations from the early 30’s to the end of his life. His work on ontology provided a basic framework for most of the discussions of ontology in analytic philosophy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. There are three main themes (and several sub-themes) that Quine developed in his work. The first is ontological commitment: What are the existential commitments of a theory? The second is ontological reduction: How can an ontology be reduced to (or substituted by) another? And what is the most economical ontology that can be obtained for certain given purposes? The third is criteria of identity: When are entities of some kind (sets, properties, material objects, propositions, meanings, etc.) the same or different? In this paper I discuss Quine’s development of these three themes and some of the problems that were aised in connection with his work.