ABSTRACT
The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle held that objects and properties constitute two different categories of being. Properties such as roundness and redness were held to be universals. According to Plato, such universals are transcendent, outside of space and time, yet instantiated in concrete objects. Bertrand Russell is a realist who rejects the substance/universal dualism of the Greeks and regards ordinary objects not as unities of substances and universals but merely as bundles of universals. Russell's response was to eliminate the category of substance and to conceive of ordinary objects as bundles of universals. Since Plato, many philosophers have held that properties and relations are universals. This chapter examines the range of views that attempt to account for objects and their properties without appeal to universals. Trope theory holds that properties and relations are themselves particulars. Trope theory may be a promising account of objects and properties, but that project still has much in the way of unfinished business.
