Abstract

In this thesis I present and defend Kris McDaniel’s ontological pluralism. Ontological pluralism for McDaniel is the doctrine that there are different ways of being. In The Fragmentation of Being (2017) McDaniel wants to motivate this thesis for reasonable ontological outlooks. For example, if you believe there only exists concrete entities and abstract entities, you might also believe that these entities have a different way of being. McDaniel’s motivation for ontological pluralism is theoretical. The theoretical motivation attempts to show how being behaves differently when we apply it to entities of different kinds. If McDaniel can show that being behaves differently when applied to objects of different kinds, then we can begin to see why we would have good reason to think there are different ways of being. McDaniel has two tests to show this, the first is showing if a feature is systematically variably axiomatic (SVA) or systematically variably polyadic (SVP). If a feature is SVA, then the principles which govern a feature differ systematically for different kinds of entities and if a feature is SVP, then the number of entities needing to saturate the feature differ systematically when applied to different kinds of entities. McDaniel argues that if being is either SVA or SVP for some reasonable ontological schema, then we have good reason to be ontological pluralist. In this thesis I will defend this position against several objections which come from Terenton Merricks, Sungil Han, and Wouter Cohen. The objections they present attack different aspects of McDaniel’s thesis which attempt to undermine the justification for positing a difference in being. I will argue that these objections fail for various reasons.