ON SUBSTANCES, ACCIDENTS AND UNIVERSALS: IN DEFENCE OF A CONSTITUENT ONTOLOGY
Barry Smith · Philosophical Papers · 1997
The theory of categories presented in what follows is a heavily revised and expanded version of the ideas set forth in Smith 1992.I should like to thank Alan Clune, Michael Gorman, Jorge Gracia, Shaun Cutts, Mariam Thalos, and the participants in the Greensboro meeting for helpful comments.2. This scheme is outlined by Hoffman and Rosenkrantz in Chapter One of their 1994.Unlike Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, however, I am interested not in the scheme as such but in the reality which the scheme describes.The reality is indeed independent of the scheme: the discipline of paleontology, after all, describes the universe of mesoscopic objects as this existed before the evolution of human beings, and many other scientific disciplines, too, including anatomy and other branches of medicine, deal with mesoscopic objects in ways which dictate a conception of the latter as more than merely the products of 'folk' conceptions.