ABSTRACT
The origin of this chapter lies in a puzzlement I have felt about how Putnam understands Quine's views on existence and ontology. I have found it difficult to put my finger on what his quarrel with Quine about this has been. But one could also see it as a fragment of a commentary on the following recent remark of Putnam. Speaking of the lectures “Ethics Without Ontology” published in the book of that name, Putnam writes that they
… provided me with an opportunity to formulate and present in public something that I realized I had long wanted to say, namely that the renewed (and continuing) respectability of Ontology (the capital letter here is intentional!) following the publication of W. V. Quine's “On what there is” at the midpoint of the last century had disastrous consequences for just about every part of analytic philosophy.
(Putnam 2004: 2)