ABSTRACT
Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations, and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences. They may not all agree with the spirit of Rutherford’s quoted remark that “there is physics; and there is stampcollecting”,1 but they all grant physical science a unique ontological authority: the authority to tell us what there is.
