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1 - Substance and other categories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2009

Joshua Hoffman  and
Gary S. Rosenkrantz
Joshua Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Gary S. Rosenkrantz
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
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Summary

First philosophy, according to the traditional schedule, is analytic ontology, examining the traits necessary to whatever is, in this or any possible world. Its cardinal problem is that of substance and attribute.

D. C. Williams Principles of Empirical Realism 74 (1966)

[Categories are] … the different kinds of notions corresponding to the definite forms of existence… an enumeration of all things capable of being named, the most extensive classes into which things could be distributed.

“Category” Oxford English Dictionary (1971)

STATEMENT AND DEFENSE OF OUR PROJECT

Metaphysics has often been revisionary, and less often descriptive. Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure.

P. F. Strawson Individuals 9 (1959)

One of the main projects in this book is to conduct a conceptual investigation of the notion of an individual substance as ordinarily understood, paradigm instances of which seem to be particular material objects and persons. In one of its ordinary senses, the term ‘thing’ means individual substance. For example, the term ‘thing’ is being used in this sense in the following sentences:

‘Wisdom is not a thing, it is a quality of a thing’.

‘Surfaces and holes are not things, they are limits and absences of them, respectively’.

‘A chameleon's turning color is not a thing, it is a change in one’.

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Substance among Other Categories , pp. 5 - 28
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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