Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by idetifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency between entities of different categories. He proceeds to set out a unified and original metaphysical system: he defends a substance ontology, according to which the existence of the world s (...) one world in time depends upon the existence of persisting things which retain their identity over time and through processes of qualitative change. And he contends that even necessary beings, such as the abstract objects of mathematics, depend ultimately for their existence upon there being a concrete world of enduring substances. Within his system of metaphysics Lowe seeks to answer many of the deepest and most challenging questions in philosophy. (shrink)

In this volume, John Bacon argues that it is difficult to deny the existence of particularized properties and relations, which in modern philosophy are sometimes called `tropes'. In so doing, he advances a powerful and sophisticated metaphysical theory according to which both ordinary particulars and properties and relations are bundles of tropes.

P.F. Strawson's essay traces some formal characteristics of logic and grammar to their roots in general features of thought and experience.

This book revives a neglected but important topic in philosophy: the nature of substance. The belief that there are individual substances, for example, material objects and persons, is at the core of our common-sense view of the world yet many metaphysicians deny the very coherence of the concept of substance. The authors develop an account of what an individual substance is in terms of independence from other beings. In the process many other important ontological categories are explored: property, event, space, (...) time. The authors show why alternative theories of substance fail, and go on to defend the intelligibility of interacting spiritual and material substances. (shrink)

[Translation of Frege's 'Über das Trägheitsgesetz].

Chris Daly; Tropes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 253–262, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/94.1.253.

Chris Daly; Tropes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 253–262, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/94.1.253.

In this paper I want to show that topology has a bearing on the theory of tropes. More precisely, I propose a topological ontology of tropes. This is to be understood as follows: trope ontology is a „one-category”-ontology countenancing only one kind of basic entities, to wit, tropes. 1 Hence, individuals, properties, relations, etc. are to be constructed from tropes.

This book develops an account of what substance is in terms of the notion of independence. As the authors note, there is a tradition of defining substance as independent that begins with Aristotle. But what notion of independence can provide an adequate definition of substance? The authors find traditional attempts to define independence, including Aristotle’s, inadequate on a number of grounds, and they propose an alternative account. As a preface to this undertaking, the authors consider and reject a number of (...) standard objections to their project, and as an afterword, they argue that the notion of spiritual substance is as intelligible as the notion of material substance. (shrink)

The paper attempts to clarify some fundamental aspects of an explanationof the concept of truth which is neither “deflationary” nor “substantive”.The main aspect examined in detail concerns the ontological dimension of truth, the mind/language-world connection traditionally associated with the concept of truth. It is claimed that it does not make sense to defend or reject a relatedness of truth to the ontological dimension so long as the kind of presupposed or envisaged ontology is not made explicit and critically examined. In (...) particular, it is shown that generally an “objectual” ontology is – often only implicitly – presupposed, i.e., an ontology admitting “objects” (substances), properties, relations, sometimes also facts, events, and the like. The paper demonstrates that such an ontology derives from the Principle of Semantic Sentential Compositionality and that this principle should be rejected. It introduces instead the Principle of Semantic Sentential Contextuality (or Context Principle) as the semantic basis of a new ontology, an ontology of “primary states of affairs”. After sketching such an ontology, it is shown that the relatedness of truth to the ontological dimension becomes intelligible. (shrink)

This article considers reasons for and reasons against postulating substrata in ontology, and argues that the case against amounts to a refutation.