I did my doctoral dissertation on Quine's naturalistic epistemology, and I must say that you, Dr. Bonevac, really know your Quine and are a great, engaging teacher! Keep it up.

Prof. Bonevac, thank you for posting these lectures. I appreciate your lecture style and enjoy learning more about modern philosophy.

The eternal return of philosophical ideas always goes back to either plato or Aristotle or Socrates.

this was incredible, this was a lot to cover and the lecturer makes it so clear in such a short space of time. I'm so grateful for this.

Shout out to Prof. Bonevac who explains quine better than my metaphysics Prof

Thank you for posting this lecture. I am currently taking an undergraduate metaphysics class but I feel I am a little bit more behind in philosophy than my peers. Although my professor is good it helps to hear other professors lectures on the same topic.

The Essence-Existence distinction drawn by Aquinas keeps creeping into my head as I hear this very interesting Bonevac lecture on things and the ideas of them

Many thanks for discussing this important text. I totally agree about Quine's style of writing!

This is so perfect

Analysis is one great way of resolving long standing issue of language and how we formulate our arguments or formalized conceptual logic just like the categorical theories. But I do also see its limit on certain philosophical questions. Esp. when dealing with metaphysics. And I'm still waiting for another great philosopher who will resolve this issue just like Immanuel Kant tried to make Empiricism and Rationalism works together.

Thank you.

One problem is that to decide for any X whether X exists, or whether there is anything that is X, we must begin by hypothetically positing the existence of X.  And as between you and me, we must both have a reasonable sense of what X is if we are to proceed further.  So we have to partially develop the thing by using understandable, meaningful words, even to deny its existence.  But we cannot escape the feeling that if I say, "The round square does not exist," your appropriate response should be, "I'm sorry, I don't understand."  And then my appropriate remark should be, "I'm afraid I don't know what I just said,"  because there is something that seems wrong even about my being able to hold in memory something logically impossible represented by a contradictory description.  However, the words do seem to latch onto something which I can then hold onto, and that is a problem.  Nonetheless, in the realm of impossible things, it does seem reasonable to ask if there is some difference between those of which I - at least apparently - can speak, and those of which no notion whatever arises in me or anyone.  In other words, if we are speaking of impossible objects, there are those for which I can put together some sort of mental and linguistic representation, and those of which I cannot.  For these last, it is impossible to consider the status - existing or not.  So another problem would be that objects in this last group are such that none can be said to be impossible - they just are.

Thankyou!

Actually, this part of “on what there is” is pretty easy to understand as opposed to the next part where Quine begins talking about whether attributes and meaning exist and then the relationship between ontology and semantics.

Emperor's new clothes

Song about him " the mighty quine"

Thank you Professor Bonevac for posting your phenomenal lectures.

37:48 the Wittgenstein quote is in the Tractatus around §5.5303

I thought that if you study in the USA, than you pay a huge summ of your money for it and that students will therefore be better prepared and do their homework more carefully compared to European students

26:00 but the idea of an idea... is still just an idea. Are ideas invariant in their meta - i.e. they are "flat".