AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

I explore the metaphor of "nothing-over-and-aboveness" and the ontological "free lunch" as it features in neo-Aristotelian and Quinean approaches to ontology. The main question I consider is how should we cash out such talk. Does it track a metaphysically significant relation, or does it simply indicate a lack of ontological commitment? For instance, some metaphysicians, such as Jonathan Schaffer and Karen Bennett, have used grounding relations and explanation to argue that their ontologies are more parsimonious. There appear to be a range of relata and relations that may license such talk. For example, the aforementioned grounding relations, reduction, and identity relations, along with fundamentalia and derivata. I will also consider how the theory virtue of parsimony features in cases from metaphysics as compared to how it features in scientific practice. Finally, I defend the view that there may be no ontologically innocent entities, in line with a Quinean approach to ontology.