Artefacts, Non-Particulars and Model Particulars
Artefacts, Non-Particulars and Model Particulars

Summary/Abstract: The paper comments and elaborates upon five pages of P. F. Strawson’s Individuals (1959, 230 – 234), together with his ‘Entity and Identity’ and ‘Universals’. The focus is on Strawson’s understanding of individual non-particulars as types or universals, and on his contention that the most obvious non-particular entities (‘well-entrenched nonparticulars’) are the broadly conceived artefacts including the works of art. The narrow focus is on the implications of Strawson’s suggestion that ‘an appropriate model for non-particulars of these kinds is that of a model particular―a kind of prototype, or ideal example, itself particular, which serves as a rule or standard for the production of others’ (1959, 233). The paper analyzes the relation between Strawson’s position and the issue of artefacts and their (largely missing) ontology. It also asks about some less obvious affinities between the problem of the non-particulars (and their entrenchment) and Strawson’s concept of a person.

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