Translating Epistemology into Ontology: Two Versions of an Argument

This paper reconstructs an argument about how epistemological principles can come to function as ontological commitments. The argument holds that, when an epistemological framework has universal scope and supplies the conditions under which anything enters the field of inquiry, the conditions it establishes amount to conditions of being. The paper traces this argument across the analytic-continental divide and suggests that what appears in each as a distinctive philosophical operation can be read as two versions of the same move. In the first part, I identify the argument as it emerges in phenomenological-hermeneutic readings of canonical texts of modern philosophy. In the second, I argue that the same argument is defended by Quine, though in a different key – openly affirmed rather than read out of texts as a diagnosis and held without recourse to a transcendental standpoint. I conclude that the argument is thus separable from the diagnosis use the first tradition puts it to, and that Quine’s ontological position is less deflationary than its standard reception has been willing to admit. Finally, I suggest that the ontological pluralism that follows from the argument is available in either idiom – without committing to the nostalgia of the one or the austerity of the other.