The main purpose of the research project has been to investigate the prospects of a certain kind of view on ontological questions within philosophy – questions about what exists – and if possible to find a way to justify this view. The view in question is, in slogan form that it is easy to exist (this is the thesis of the “lightness of being”); that all putative entities which satisfy already rather minimal contexts do exists. In the contemporary literature, views like this have been defended by theorists like Amie Thomasson, Stephen Schiffer, Oystein Linnebo, Agustín Rayo, and also by neo-Fregeans like Crispin Wright and Bob Hale.

The principal investigator has been Matti Eklund. Two postdocs have been employed within the project, first Tobias Wilsch and then (after Wilsch moved to take up a post at Tübingen) Jonathan Shaheen.  Oystein Linnebo and Agustín Rayo have been associated with the project as regular guests and have come for several visits, to give seminar presentations and have informal meetings. Four workshops/conferences have been arranged under the auspices of the project. The basic format has been the same for each: two full days with about eight lectures in all. Big enough to be a real event, but small enough to keep it relatively informal. We have made sure that junior researchers and female researchers are included. Moreover, we have organized a reading group for project members and others at the department who have been interested. In addition, research seminars have been organized, some with invited speakers and some with presentations from local researchers. Aside from organized events we have of course read and commented on each other’s texts.

When it comes to results, these fall in two categories, in a natural and predictable way. There are results directly connected to the central research question of the project, and results that rather concern related issues.

A first group of results belong to the first category. Eklund’s article “The Metametaphysics of Neo-Fregeanism” is the main work here. The article is in part an overview of the discussion of views regarding what kind of perspective of ontology is demanded by neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics, but mainly the article makes some original contributions to this discussion. Neo-Fregeanism in some way demands that it is easy to exist, but it is unclear and debated in just what way. The relevance of the article for the research project is due to the fact that neo-Fregeanism is the most widely discussed view connected to the view that being is easy. The article discusses both various interpretations of neo-Fregeanism and what neo-Fregeans themselves have said at different stages. Then the article focuses on a positive proposal regarding what the neo-Fregean ought to say. The accounts neo-Fregeans tend to give of why it is easy for something to exist standardly advert to the supposed fact that it is enough for a certain type of entity to exist than names of entities of this type occur in true sentences of the right kind. But the natural follow-up question is then what is required for a given sentence to be true, and here the neo-Fregeans have had little to say. My suggestion is that the neo-Fregeans – as well as other theorists who wants to defend the idea that being is easy – should say that for a sentence to be true it is not required that it bears a structural similarity to some intrinsic structure the world is supposed to have.

A second group of results, also within the first category, have to do with what tends to go under the name “quantifier variance”. Briefly, this is the thesis that there are different possible concepts of existence and none of them is better than, or metaphysically privileged over, all others. The thesis of quantifier variance is an alternative to the thesis of the lightness of being, but in the same spirit: it aims to deflate or dissolve philosophical existence debates. One argument for the lightness of being that has been given in the literature is that considerations used to motivate quantifier variance in fact favor lightness theses. Such arguments sometimes build on formal results (these are often called “collapse arguments”) and sometimes build on semantic considerations (e.g. Eklund has earlier given arguments like this, and this kind of argument is often labeled “the Eklund-Hawthorne argument”). These arguments have generated a lively debate. One of Eklund’s articles written within the present project, “Collapse and the Varieties of Quantifier Variance”, assesses the arguments in light of objections that have been presented. The conclusion is, as the title suggests, that there are importantly different quantifier variance theses; and the soundness of the collapse argument and the Eklund-Hawthorne argument depend on which quantifier variance thesis is targeted. The article also assesses what support there is for the different quantifier variance theses, and what the significance of these different theses is. A second article partly about quantifier variance, “Variance Theses in Metaontology and Metaethics”, notes that quantifier variance just is an instance of a general kind of thesis (“a variance thesis”) which can be proposed within many different areaas of philosophy. Theses that Eklund has discussed within a research project on metaethics can be seen as variance theses. The article discusses general problems faced by variance theses, and in which cases these problems arise.

A third group of results, within the second category, have to do with explanation, and specifically with metaphysical explanation. According to a popular view within contemporary metaphysics, metaphysics deals with certain kinds of explanations, constitutive (sometimes called “metaphysical”) explanations. Understood in that way, metaphysics is a kind of extension of science, and deals with explanations much as science does. The thesis of the lightness of being is naturally, although certainly not inevitably, tied to the thought that metaphysical theorizing isn’t theorizing in the same sense as that of the sciences. Eklund’s article “Regress, Unity, Facts and Propositions” discusses the famous problem having to do with “the unity of the proposition”, and argues that this problem arises because entities such as facts and propositions are postulated as explanatory. If one gets rid of the explanatory pretensions the problem goes away. Shaheen has as yet unpublished work (presented widely at seminars and conferences) persuasively arguing that metaphysical explanations are explanations only in a metaphorical sense. (It may be natural to see this as a criticism of the idea of metaphysical explanation but that is not the way Shaheen sees it.)

The results presented in Wilsch’s works are also best presented in light of the discussion of explanations. Wilsch’s work takes seriously the notion of metaphysical explanation, and deals in a constructive way with explanations that are suggested in various metaphysical debates, for example the debate about modality, and Wilsch also develops the idea that there are “metaphysical laws”, similar to the laws of nature that the natural sciences are standardly held to discover.

When it comes to what new research questions that have been generated, there is one I would particularly like to emphasize. The idea of the lightness of being is in the first instance the idea that it is easy for things like objects, properties and relations to exist – or, if one expresses the idea metalinguistically, as is common, hat it is easy for singular terms and predicates to refer. But might there be languages with expressions that belong to what for us are alien or exotic semantic categories, and might there be entities for such expressions to refer to? This question arise within the research project, in connection with questions about the lightness of being. Is someone who thinks it is easy to exist also committed to holding that such alien entities exist? These questions about alien entities and expressions are very fruitful philosophical questions to ask, connected to many different questions inside and outside philosophy. They relate to contemporary research within metaphysics, where a guiding idea is that the fundamental structure of the world can differ greatly from how we naturally imagine the world mist be like. They also relate to basic metaphysical questions about what objects, properties and relations really are. The relate to central questions in philosophy of language concerning what singular terms and predicates really are, and to questions about what possible languages there can be. Outside philosophy, these issues relate to questions within empirical linguisics (which differences are there between how different natural languages represent the world?) and cognitive science (to what extent it is necessary for us to represent the world in terms of objects and their properties?).

When it comes to the project’s international dimensions, these should be evident. All the publications are in international journals and anthologies. The first postdoc within the project, Tobias Wilsch, came most recently from Rutgers University (USA) and has gone on to a position at the University of Tübingen (Germany); the second postdoc, Jonathan Shaheen, has a PhD degree from University of Michigan (USA) and came most recently from Ghent University (Belgium) where he now returns for a research project, after his employment in Uppsala has come to an end. Oystein Linnebo is at University of Oslo (Norway) and Agustín Rayo is at MIT (USA). Almost all speakers at the conferences that have been organized have come from outside Sweden. The researchers active within the project have also presented results at international conferences and seminars many times. For example, the principal investigator, Matti Eklund, has presented results from the project in Argentina, Ireland, USA, Austria, Norway, the UK, Finland, and Croatia.