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.

Klappentext
This volyme brings together new investigations of the ontological credentials of such entities as Things, Events, States of Affairs, Variable and Non-Existent Objects, Properties, Tropes, and Tendencies, by a number of leading philosophers. The variety of ontological categories explored and the discussion of the consequences for theories of language, representation and truth of different ontological commitments are the two most novel features of this collection.

Zusammenfassung
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.

Inhalt
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.