87 Quotes About Ontology

We believe in Quine, the father of metaontology, and in his criterion of ontological commitment. Which for us ontologists and for our craft was perfectly born in On What There Is. We believe in one catholic and first-order logic. We acknowledge one method—paraphrase—for the remission of ontological sins. And when paraphrase fails, we accept without shame the entities required by our best theories. Amen.

Final answers are not to be trusted. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements.

How many possible men are there in that doorway?

If [things] seem to have a relative unreality ... it is because they are potential and not actual; they are unfulfilled ... They have it in them to be more real than they are.

Do clocks tell time or does time tell clocks

Everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist," so said Pascal. In fact, its incomprehensibility validates its existence: For that which does not exist we can hardly give adjectives, like incomprehensible.

The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.