Can we repudiate ontology altogether?

Abstract

Ontological nihilists repudiate ontology altogether, maintaining that ontological structure is an unnecessary addition to our theorizing. Recent defenses of the view involve a sophisticated combination of highly expressive but ontologically innocent languages combined with a metaphysics of features—non‐objectual, complete but modifiable states of affairs invoked in natural language feature‐placing sentences like “It is raining.” Nihilists argue that they are able to preserve the core of our ordinary claims without appealing to any ontology. In this paper, I argue that by repudiating ontology, the nihilist is unable to make their nihilist‐friendly language intelligible in terms of a nihilist metaphysics that preserves an undemanding notion of explanatory unity exhibited by our ordinary claims. This puts significant pressure on the nihilist's claim that ontology is an unnecessary addition to our theorizing.