This paper explores a novel analysis of adjectives in the comparative and the positive based on the notion of a trope, rather than the notion of a degree. Tropes are particularized properties, concrete manifestations of properties in individuals. The point of departure is that a sentence like ‘John is happier than Mary’ is intuitively equivalent to ‘John’s happiness exceeds Mary’s happiness’, a sentence that expresses a simple comparison between two tropes, John’s happiness and Mary’s happiness. The analysis received particular support (...) from various parallels between adjectival constructions and corresponding adjective nominalizations which make reference to tropes. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to make the notion of an ontology of fields mathematically rigorous. The conclusion will be that couching an ontology in terms of mathematical bundles and cross-sections (i.e. fields) both (1) captures many important intuitions of conventional ontologies, including the universal-particular paradigm, the connection of universals and their ‘instantiations’, and the notion of ‘possibility’, and (2) makes possible the framing of ontologies without ‘substrata’, bare particulars, and primitive particularizers (a goal that trope ontologies, for (...) example, have sought to attain). (shrink)

The categorial concepts of substance (thing) and substance (stuff) are described, and the conceptual relationships between things and their constitutive stuff delineated. The relationship between substance concepts, expressed by other count-nouns, and natural kind concepts is examined. Artefacts and their parts are argued to be substances, whereas parts of organisms are not. The confusions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers who invoked the concept of substance are adumbrated.

I discuss puzzles involving coinciding material objects (such as statues and their constitutive lumps of clay) and propose solutions.