The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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"Substance," Hartshorne says, is "simply the technical term for individuality as a philosophical category." Similarly, he says, "matter" is "but a word for whatever it is that forms the concreteness of inanimate nature." 

In somewhat the same way, I should say that "being," like "reality," is simply the term properly used to talk about the property of anything that is real in any way or sense whatever, as distinct from unreal, mere appearance, or fiction. Of course, "being" so used transcends the distinction between "fixed being" and "becoming (= process)," or "abstract" and "concrete (= concrescence)."

7 May 2005

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