Abstract
If our language did not contain the words ‘particular,’ ‘quality,’ ‘relation,’ ‘universal,’ ‘proposition,’ and ‘entity,’ we could not make such statements as ‘There are particulars,’ ‘There are universals,’ and ‘There are entities.’ For that matter, if our language didn’t contain the word ‘river,’ we couldn’t say ‘There are rivers.’ In the latter case, however, we know that even if our language happened not to contain the word ‘river,’ it does contain resources which permit the formulation of There are rivers in other terms. The question thus arises. What are the resources which are tapped by the former, and philosophically more exciting, statements?
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Notes
Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (transí, by R. D. Hicks ). I.ocb Classical Library. 1925. p. 55.
Alonzo Church, in ‘The Need for Abstract Entities in Semantic Analysis.’ Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80 (1951), 104.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Sellars, W. (1974). Empiricism and Abstract Entities. In: Essays in Philosophy and Its History. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2291-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2291-0_12
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