Publisher's Synopsis
This volume is about ontological categories. The categories of an ontology are designed to classify all existents. They are crucial and characterise an ontology. There are substance ontologies, there are trope ontologies and there are fact ontologies. Ontologies differ also with respect to the number of their categories. There are ontologies with few and ontologies with many categories. Some advocate more or less explicitly only one category. The so-called descriptive metaphysics which is satisfied with explaining the categories of common sense admits the greatest number of categories. The contributors of this volume address the central problems of the theory categories in the classical, phenomenological and analytical tradition. With contributions of Javier Cumpa, Herbert Hochberg, Ingvar Johansson, Jonathan Lowe, Donald W Mertz, Roberto Poli, Erwin Tegtmeier and Fred Wilson.
