Ontology Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Reality of things=== The word 'real' is derived from the Latin word ''res'', which is often translated as 'thing'. The word 'thing' is often used in ontological discourse as if it had a presupposed meaning, not needing an explicit philosophical definition because it belongs to ordinary language. Nevertheless, what is a thing and what is real or substantial are concerns of ontology.<ref name="Erices"/><ref>Thomasson, A. L. (2007). ''Ordinary Objects'', Oxford University Press, New York, {{ISBN|978-0195319910}}, p. 7: "I argue that while there are various ways of addressing questions about what 'things' exist, ..."</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Sandkühler |first=Hans Jörg |url=https://meiner.de/enzyklopadie-philosophie.html |title=Enzyklopädie Philosophie |date=2010 |publisher=Meiner |language=de |section=Zweifel, methodischer: 2 Zur Begriffs- und Problemgeschichte. ›reale Dinge (entia realia)‹ |access-date=2020-12-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210311040207/https://meiner.de/enzyklopadie-philosophie.html |archive-date=2021-03-11 |url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>Eddington, A.S. (1928). ''The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures 1927'', Macmillan, London, England and New York, reprinted 1929 p. ix: "... it is the distinctive characteristic of a "thing" to have this substantiality".</ref><ref name="Isham"/> Different views are held about this. Plato proposed that underlying – and constituting the real basis of – the concretely experienced world are '[[Theory of forms|forms]]' or 'ideas', which today are generally regarded as high abstractions. In earlier days, philosophers used the term '[[Platonic realism|realism]]' to refer to Plato's belief that his 'forms' are 'real'; nowadays, the term 'realism' often has an almost opposite meaning, so that Plato's belief is sometimes called '[[idealism]]'.<ref>Hale, B. (2009). "Realism and antirealism about abstract entities", pp. 65–73 in Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, ''A Companion to Metaphysics'', 2nd ed., Wiley–Blackwell, Chichester, UK, {{ISBN|978-1405152983}}.1.</ref> Philosophers debate whether entities such as tables and chairs, lions and tigers, philosophical doctrines, numbers, truth, and beauty, are to be regarded as 'things', or as something or nothing 'real'. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page