ABSTRACT
In the history of philosophy, relations have fared even worse than properties. The Aristotelian tradition, for one, has not been hospitable to relations. Relations, it is obvious, would have to belong to the category of accident rather than that of substance. But a (two-term) relation, if it is conceived of as an accident, would have to involve two different substances at once-as Leibniz put it, it would have to have one leg in each one of two distinct substances-and this is simply impossible for an accident, as the Aristotelian understands it.1 Nor does the fate of relations change with the advent of the empiricistic attack on substances. The Berkeleyan conception of a perceptual object as a complex of properties leaves relations homeless.2 They are neither complexes nor are they parts of complexes. In order to break with the Aristotelians or the empiricistic tradition, one has to admit the existence of relations in addition to and as distinct from substances and accidents or complexes and their parts, respectively. This break, as we know, occurred only very recently. It is associated with the names of Frege, Russell, and-as we shall see-Meinong.
