Object
Created: 2025-07-31
One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls?
Created: 2025-07-31
Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including thing, being, entity, item, existent,
and—especially—object.[
Created: 2025-07-31
Put differently, are there non-objects, and if so, what kinds of things are they? Some related questions: if there are non-objects, do they form a natural class or collection? What might that class or collection be?
Created: 2025-07-31
Unsurprisingly, then, some philosophers suppose that there is a fully general category and simply define ‘object’ as picking it out. On this Umbrella View, as we shall call it, every thing is an object (perhaps by definition of ‘object’) and the category has no contrast—or, if it has a contrast or complement, the contrast is unfilled and the complement unrealized.
Created: 2025-07-31
Although they differ on which English word to assign to that category (i.e., ‘thing’, ‘term’, or ‘individual’, ‘something’), Lowe, Russell, Strawson, and Tugendhat all accept a fully general category under which all items fall and suppose that some word picks out that category. They accept, then, the Umbrella View.
Created: 2025-07-31
Consider these platitudes: there are things, and there are ways those things are (we might call the latter ‘properties’).
Created: 2025-07-31
With things and properties thus distinguished, even if very intimately connected, we have what may be called a substance-attribute view.