Opening plenary talk: Recent advances in metaphysics

From the Ontology of Interaction to the Semiotics of Education

“…Ontological theories usually try to determine what categories there are and what the formal relations between categories are; is for example some category dependent of another (e.g. Loux, 1998;Lowe, 2001;Keinänen, 2008).…”

Some problems for Lowe's four-category ontology

“…Lowe (1998b: Chap. 9, 1998c, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2003a has developed a 'four-category ontology' whose fundamental ontological categories result from two distinctions: between object and property and between particular and universal. In Lowe's metaphysical scheme, inspired by Aristotle's distinction between primary and secondary substances, there are two fundamentally different types of individual objects: particular objects, such as rocks, animals and persons, and universal objects, the most important instances of which are kinds, such as the kind oak trees or the kind gold.…”