On What There Is
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"A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: "What is there ?" It can be answered, moreover, in a word "Everything" and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries."--"On What There Is" (1948) by Quine |
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"On What There Is" (1948) is an essay by Willard Van Orman Quine .
The text elucidates Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable".
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