Language, Truth and Ontology

All except three of the papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium on "L'Ontologie formelle aujourd'hui", Geneva, 3-5 June 1988. The three exceptions, the papers by David Armstrong, Uwe Meixner and Wolfgang Lenzen, were presented at the colloquium on "Properties", Zinal, June 1-3, 1990. It was, incidentally, at the second of these two colloquia that the European Society for Analytic Philosophy came into being. The fathers of analytic philosophy - Moore and Russell - were in no doubt that ontology or metaphysics as well as the topics oflanguage, truth and logic constituted the core subject-matter of their "analytic realism", 1 for the task of metaphysics as they conceived things was the description of 2 the world. And logic and ontology are indissolubly linked in the system of the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Frege. After the Golden Age of analytic philosophy - in Cambridge and Austria - opposition to realism as well as the "linguistic turn" contributed for a long time to the eclipse of ontology. 3 Thanks in large measure to the work of some of the senior contributors to the present volume - Roderick Chisholm, Herbert Hochberg, David Armstrong and Karel Lambert - ontology and metaphysics now enjoy once again the central position they occupied some eighty years ago in the heyday of analytic philosophy.

The Basic Ontological Categories. - 1. Introduction. - 2. The Basic Concepts. - 3. Individual Things and Events. - 4. Beginnings and Processes. - 5. Necessary Substance. - Properties. - 1. Why We Should Admit Properties. - 2. Universals vs. Tropes. - On Negative and Disjunctive Properties. - Particulars, Individual Qualities, and Universals. - Characteristica Universalis. - 1. Preamble. - 2. From Leibniz to Frege. - 3. Directly Depicting Diagrams vs. Existential Graphs. - 4. Some Conditions on a Directly Depicting Language. - 5. The Oil-Painting Principle. - 6. Primitives and Definitions. - 7. Substance. - 8. Accidents. - 9. Sub-Atoms (Mutually Dependent Parts of Atoms). - 10. Boundaries and Boundary Dependence. - 11. Universals. - Definite Descriptions and the Theory of Objects. - 1. A New Explanation. - 2. An Application of the Foregoing Explanation. - Truth Makers, Truth Predicates, and Truth Types. - Worlds and States of Affairs: How Similar Can They Be? . - 1. Motivation. - 2. Salmon s Counterexample. - 3. TheBranching Conception. - Was Frege Right about Variable Objects? . - Logical Atomism and Its Ontological Refinement: A Defense. - 1. Introduction. - 2. Logical Atomism, What. - 3. Examples of the Avoidance of Unnecessary Facts. - 4. Disputed Case I: Negative Propositions. - 5. Disputed Case II: Universal Generalization. - 6. Other Higher Order Functors. - 7. Statistical Generalizations and Probability. - 8. Laws of Nature and Causality. - 9. Applied Mathematics, Dispositions, and Others. - 10. Resolution and Ultimate Facts. - 11. Concluding Remarks. - Intentionality and Tendency: How to Make Aristotle Up-To-Date. - 1. Introduction. - 2. The Problem. - 3. Aristotle. - 4. Newtonian Self-Change. - 5. Intentionality. - 6. Temporally Extended Entities. - 7. The Duality of Intentions. - 8. Formal Ontology Today. - 9. Summary. - Leibniz on Properties and Individuals. - Index of Names. - Index of Subjects.