A Way of Seeing Ways of Being: Building a Case for Ontological Pluralism

Harris, Joshua Lee; Ronald, Roger J.

doi:10.5840/acpaproc2025618172

Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

ONLINE FIRST

published on June 20, 2025

Joshua Lee Harris, Roger J. Ronald

https://doi.org/10.5840/acpaproc2025618172

A Way of Seeing Ways of Being: Building a Case for Ontological Pluralism

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are ways of being. In this paper, we build a case for ontological pluralism in the form of three contributions: (1) We offer a theoretically useful definition of “way of being” as a positive principle of similarity and difference that is distinct from—and a prior condition for—having properties. (2) We develop a test for distinguishing ways of being from properties: features of entities that are conceptually redundant when represented as predicates in standard predicate logic are ways of being. Finally, (3) we argue that there are ways of being, i.e., there are features of entities that satisfy the definition in (1) and pass the test outlined in (2). Along the way, we develop replies to objections against pluralism raised by Peter van Inwagen and Wouter Cohen.

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