The Philosophy of the Present

Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1932. First Edition 1st Printing. Green Cloth. Near Fine/No Dust Jacket. Frontispiece. Xl, 199 Pp. Green Cloth, Gilt. A Bright, Tight, Clean And Near New Example With Just A Touch Of Rubbing At Corners. Striking Bookplate By Williams, Signed W, Of A Lamp And A Hammer And Sickle, With Text All In Capital Letters "So Far As The So-Called Right Of Property Is Consistent With An Enlightened Social Ethics We Claim That Right With Respect To This Our Book Katherine Adams Williams Donald Cary Williams", With Typed Line Along Foot Of Bookplate "Publisher$::: 10/32". Williams [1899-1983] Was Chairman Of The Department Of Philosophy At Harvard University, And Was One Of America's Great Philosophers. His Wife Katherine Adams Williams, Phd [University Of California, 1928] Was A Professor Of Psychology At Radcliffe. "Many Philosophers Have Admitted The Existence Of Abstract Particulars, Properties That Occur As Particulars, Or, As Donald Williams Dubbed Them, 'Tropes'. Anyone Who Accepts Peirce'S Type/Token Distinction As Holding For The Colors, For Example, Accepts Instances Of Properties As Particulars. Anyone Who, Like Locke, Adheres To A Substance-Property Ontology, But Also Insists That All Things Are Always Only Particular, Affirms That Properties Are Particulars - That Is, Tropes. What Marks Off A Trope Metaphysic From Others Is To Be Found In What The Ontology Denies, Rather Than In What It Affirms. A Trope Metaphysic Gets Its Importance From The Primacy That It Accords To Them. Its Bite Comes From The Claim That These Are The Basic Elements, The 'Alphabet Of Being', As Donald Williams Has It. This Claim Involves As An Essential Element The Denial Of The Existence Of Genuine Universals. This Is A First And Most Significant Dimension Of Economy. Further, In Williams' Theory, The Primacy Of Tropes Is Coupled With A Bundle Theory Of Complex Concrete Particulars. So The Theory Also Involves The Denial Of The Reality Of Substances As Substrata Bearing The Properties That Inhere In Them, Or Acting As An Essential Principle Of Individuation. Here Is A Second Significant Dimension Of Economy. This Search For Ontic Economy Drives Trope Theory. Williams'S Ontology Admits But A Single Basic Category, The Abstract Particular Or Trope. It Is Worth Emphasizing That This Position Is Not Any Form Of Nominalism, Where That Term Implies The Denial Of The Existence Of Properties (And Relations). Quite The Contrary: Trope Theory Affirms That Reality Consists In Nothing But (Monadic Or Polyadic) Properties. Rather Than A Nominalism, This View Is Better Described As A Strict Particularism - It Does Not Deny That There Are Properties, But Denies That Properties Are Universals. Nor Does Trope Theory Deny The Existence Of Simple Or Complex Individuals. It Does Not Admit Substance As A Distinct Category, But Individual Basic Tropes Are Substances In The Human Sense - They Are Capable Of Independent Existence. They Do Not Require An Underlying Substratum To Bear Them. It Is One Of This Ontology'S Great Attractions That It Can In This Way Dispense With The Inherence Relation, Together With All Its Attendant Difficulties. In This Classic Paper ["The Elements Of Being"], Donald Williams Pioneers The Trope Metaphysic, Providing Us, In Beguiling Rhetoric, And A Most Admirable Independence Of Mind, An Original View Of A Perennial Crux In Metaphysics". -Keith Campbell, Emeritus Professor Of Philosophy At The University Of Sidney, Australia.