Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Abstract

Analytic metaphysics is compared with naïve aprioristic auto-anthropology and found to be a similar enterprise. A more useful anthropological approach takes folk metaphysics as a starting point, and attempts a pre-theoretical catalogue of the folk ontologies of the manifest image in preparation for accounting for the relations between things thus adumbrated and things as uncovered in the scientific image (Sellars, 1963), and it is argued that this is a proper task for philosophers. Among the candidates for thing-hood considered are sakes, dints, cahoots, smithereens, holes, voices, opportunities, dollars, fatigues, words, and numbers.

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