ABSTRACT
The recent and progressive re-emergence of ontological questions in aes-
thetics fully confirms this in a field that has its breakthroughs and drawbacks.
Ontological questions have been reintroduced in the analytical tradition
by the 1948 publication of Quine’s ‘‘On What There Is.’’2 They have since
developed in the context of a debate which in the Middle Ages already
opposed the realists, the nominalists and the conceptualists.3 Antirealism,
partially sprung from Quine’s influence and a specific reading of Wittgenstein,
contributed to a recentering of the debate around an apparently exclusive alternative, various versions of which may be found in the many fields of
philosophical thought, from the philosophy of mathematics to the philoso-
phy of mind.
