Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 15, 2008

Metaphysics

Eduardo Bermudez Barrera
Pages 273-281

El Babero Quine con la Navaja de Occam Afeitó la Barba de Platón

The ontological question goes way back to Plato. In his Teetetus he already searched for the answer to question of “how is it possible that when a man stares at something he would not see anything anyway”. Quine is the author of a doctrine on ontology, “On what there is”. His work follows the path of medieval authors such as William of Ockham, who proposed the methodology that came to be known as Okcham's razor. The excessive proliferation of entities is known as “Plato's beard”. Quine, among others, has shaved Plato's beard searching for logical and scientific simplicity.