What is the so-called “question of ontology?” Is the question of ontology genuinely a question about “categories” (Lowe 2006), “structure” (Sider 2011), “existence” (Thomasson 2015), or rather “reality” (Fine 2009)? In this article, I defend the neo-Sellarsian approach to the question of ontology, a novel, naturalistic approach according to which the foundational question of ontology is about “understanding the manifest and the scientific images of the world, and their multiple relationships.” First, I argue for the thesis of Impure Eliminativism, a (...) form of constructive pluralism about the question of ontology by which the substantivity of questions of ontology which are not the neo-Sellarsian one is to be built upon certain relations with the neo-Sellarsian question of ontology. Second, I argue for the categorial plasticity of the two images and their relations in connection with the hypothesis of Weak Epistemic Factualism. Third, and lastly, I argue for a person-based ontology framed in terms of the crucial notions of “fact” and “understanding” in response to the eliminativist categorizations of the two images and their relationships proposed by substantialism and structuralism. (shrink)

Traditionally, the so-called exemplification or the relation between the particular and the universal has been one of the three central problems making up the classical problem of universals: (1) What is a particular? (2) What is a universal? (3) What is the relation between the particular and the universal? I used the expression “classical problem of universals” instead of “the problem of universals” since the classical formulation of the problem could be said to contain a questionable assumption, namely that substance (...) should be the bearer “in” which are the entities of (other) categories. Under these circumstances, a neutral approach to the problem of universals could consist in reformulating the three problems of the classical problem as follows: (4) What is the fundamental bearer of categories? (5) What categories are there? (6) What is the relation between the fundamental bearer and the categories? My purpose in this paper is to answer the latter three questions. In order to accomplish this task, I shall discuss the views of two leading figures in substance-ontology, Aristotle and Jonathan Lowe, and the views of two leading figures in fact-ontology, Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann. I shall answer the first question by claiming that the fundamental bearer of categories is facts; the second, by pointing out that it depends on the answer to the previous one; and the third, by showing that the relation between the fundamental bearer and the categories is the one between facts and its constituents, not between a substance or particular and its accidents or properties. In this connection, I shall argue that the “in” of property exemplification should be categorially reconstructed in order for entities other than properties, say, particulars, relations, connectives, numbers, and even facts, to be “in” facts. This categorial reconstruction will also argued for with respect to the Principle of Exemplification. (shrink)