Reading On what there is in 2026
Reading “On what there is” again in 2026, I am vert surprised about many things about it. Not onyl the tone – even though Alejandro Vazquez del Mercado has reminded me of how much the tone of analytic scholarship has changed in the last century, I was still surprised – but also how good it is! So many good and deep thoughts! And also how ba d it is, as well! It is rigurous in following his and his opponents arguments to their consequences, but when it comes to give a final argument against Meinongianism and Platonism, he just shrugs and claims that: “I remain free to maintain that the fact that a given linguistic utterance is meaningful (or significant, as I prefer to say so as not to invite hypostasis of meanings as entities) is an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact; or, I may undertake to analyze it in terms directly of what people do in the presence of the linguistic utterance in question and other utterances similar to it.” And later “The problem of explaining these...