The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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"Actuality" refers to the inclusive mode of reality. Actuality, accordingly, is a property, although it is not a property in the same sense in which ordinary properties are. Nor is it a property of properties. Rather, it is a property of everything except properties, whereas other (ordinary) properties are properties of only some of the things that are not properties. Everything except a property (or a mere abstraction) is an actuality (or a class or a system of actualities). Being actual is the same as being wholly particular or concrete or as being wholly definite (conforming to the law of excluded middle as to properties).

"Existence" refers to the fact that, among the things that are actual, some, if not all, exemplify certain properties, ordinary as well as extraordinary, including "individualities," i.e., individually distinctive properties, or properties definitive of one and only one individual.

5 February 1998; rev. 23 March 2001 

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