This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

1. 1. On What There Is

   

   An influential defense of a formal, quantifier-based approach to ontology: the essay argues that existence is expressed by the existential quantifier rather than by a special predicate, and that our ontological commitments consist in whatever entities our best theories quantify over. It rejects Meinongian nonentities and other devices that posit strange kinds of being, urging that disputes about what exists be settled by analyzing the variables and paraphrases required by competing theories so that mathematical or abstract objects are accepted only if indispensable to our best scientific descriptions. The result is a pragmatic, theory-driven criterion for deciding what there is.