Gary, how many things are in your office or study?

When you start trying to answer the question, you'll probably have to face the question, what counts as a "thing"? Is the eraser on a pencil a thing, distinct from the pencil? Are the molecules in the eraser "things"? Etc.

The term "thing" is what David Wiggins called a "dummy sortal." A sortal is a "count noun," i.e. it names a member of a class that can be counted, like a poem as opposed to poetry in general. A dummy sortal looks like a substantive that names an item that can be counted, but in fact it does not refer to a definable individual or group of individuals. Examples of dummy sortals are "thing, something, state of affairs, entity, event." The dummy sortal doesn't provide any criteria of identity by which its referent can be identified. You can identify some objects demonstratively and then call them by dummy sortal names, e.g. "What's that thing sitting on your shoulder?", but other definers, context and pragmatics suffice to make clear that in this case, you mean "thing" to refer to the monkey. The word "thing" by itself doesn't do that work. So when questions include dummy sortals, they tend to become pseudo-questions. There is no way in principle to answer the question, how many things are in your office.  

So on the above take, although it does not follow that we can never use the word "thing", your question may get farther if you take out "thing" and reformulate it. I think you are right, though, to press the notion that an act of existence is added to a substance. Aquinas, for example, says that an immaterial substance becomes real when God confers an act of existence on it. Its act of existence is analogous to a material composite's form, and its substance is analogous to the composite's matter. As students of Thomas know, this is not a notion found in Aristotle. It's very important to establish its coherence.

Last edited by ficino (11/25/2017 9:22 am)