Peter van Inwagen’s Meta-ontology. Translators’ Foreword

Abstract

Peter van Inwagen (b. 1942) is one of the living metaphysicians who has made a substantial contribution to both theoretical (ontology and metaphysics of material Objects) and special metaphysics (in discussions on the problem of free will and the personal identity problem). With rare exceptions there are no works of van Inwagen in Russian. This publication is intended to correct this shortcoming to a certain extent. We present to the Russian-speaking reader a translation of one of his classical works – the paper Meta-Ontology (1998), which constitutes a significant milestone in the development of analytical ontology: in it the so-called “Standard View” in ontology is summarized and for the first time the concept of “Meta-Ontology” is given in as name for the section of analytical metaphysics, which has as its subject the meaning and the sense of the very being, or existence.