Javier Cumpa

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Categories and the Question of Ontology

31 March 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Is the question of ontology a search for the categories of the world? Is structure a fundamental and indispensable category of the world? Ontological categories of structure have played a fundamental role in contemporary metaphysics. They have been recently invoked in support of realism about structure (Sider 2012), or to maintain substance-attribute ontology (Heil 2012). In both cases, the question of ontology is closely linked to uncover the fundamental ontological categories of the world, and ontological categories are said to have an indispensable role in providing us with a basic and objective understanding of the manifest and scientific images of the world. In this paper, I critically examine Ted Sider’s arguments for the fundamentality and indispensability of the ontological categories of structure, and I conclude that the ontological categories of structure are neither fundamental nor indispensable. An alternative, eliminativist approach to categories is then proposed as a way of doing ontology and understanding the question of ontology.