ABSTRACT
The case of photographs is similar to the case of musical works, but it is perhaps even more complicated, and thus even more interesting. For the metaphysician, photographs are very puzzling entities indeed. To what ontological category photographs belong to? Are they concrete spatio-temporal entities like prints, are they universals since there can be many ‘prints-instances’ of the same photograph, are they sets or aggregates of prints, or something else? Several ontological categories reveal themselves to be enlightening and useful when describing features of what photographs are, but none will prove to be really satisfactory. Photographs, it seems, are a sort of borderline entities that share some but not all aspects of several traditional metaphysical categories. Is it then justified to postulate a new ontological category to which photographs would properly belong? On mainly methodological grounds, we shall see that it is not. Again, the best way out of this metaphysician’s trouble is to follow the eliminativist recipe. Photographs do not exist – but, as we shall see, this is not really a revisionary or anti-commonsensical claim.
