Lugano Philosophy Colloquia

Is Ontological Pluralism based on a Meta-Ontological Mistake?

Lugano Philosophy Colloquia. Byron Simmons

According to a historically prominent version of ontological pluralism, there are two fundamental ways of being that perfectly partition reality: entities located in space or time enjoy concrete existence, while everything else enjoys abstract subsistence. This view, which harkens back to Plato, reached the height of its influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before all but disappearing by the middle of the 20th century. It has more recently become the poster child of the pluralistic revival initiated by Kris McDaniel and Jason Turner. Let’s call it two-ways-of-being pluralism.

The two-ways-of-being pluralist holds that, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, an entity enjoys concrete existence if and only if that entity is located in space and time. There is, on this view, a strong necessary connection between a fact about an entity’s being and a fact about its nature. But this connection should look, from the point of view of the pluralist, to be utterly mysterious: these two facts cannot be identical (since one concerns an entity’s being and the other its nature), nor can they be grounded in one another (else a fact about an entity’s being would be ground in a fact about its nature and vice versa). It thus looks like the pluralist has simply counted a single fact about an entity’s nature twice over: once as a fact concerning its being, and again as a fact about its nature. The pluralist’s position appears to be based on a meta-ontological mistake.

In this presentation, which is based upon joint work with Damiano Costa, I aim to do three main things. I will attempt to motivate some basic principles governing the being/nature distinction. I will lay out the above argument in more detail and respond to some potential objections. And I will show how to extend this argument to other versions of pluralism.