The assignment events, objects, state of beings, etc., to an experiential category is a fundamental activity carried out by human (and by other animals). So rudimentary are the processes involved in categorizing that it is indeed impossible to imagine conscious awareness to exist without the presence of categories. A considerable body of writing exists on categories dating from the times of Classical philosophy. Plato developed a categorical ontology and Aristotle produced one of the earliest examples of a complex understanding of basic ontologies. A number of other categorially structured ontologies have been proposed including those by Lowe, Westerhoff, Chisholm, etc. The book is an edited collection of up to the moment essays that address critical aspects on the understanding of categories and categorial systems. The perspectives included in the book are drawn from philosophy, psychology, theology, divinity, comparative cognition and facet theory. The authors are all renowned experts in the area of their writing. Topics addressed include both contemporary advances in the understanding of perennial debates and latest thinking upon how categories are employed to structure our experiences of the world we live in. The book is distinct as being written by philosophers and psychologists. The book is a collection of writings from selected academics at the fore of debates and understandings of categories in contemporary thought. The text provides a single source for contemporary scholarship in categories. No single text that brings together expositions of categorial experiences for students and academics within the above listed disciplines.

This book describes a novel conception of reality, one that uniquely incorporates an idealistic view of existence with an account of objectivity. It introduces a general model of conceptual analysis and demonstrates its effectiveness in exposing and establishing the existence of conceptual ties. The book begins by introducing the tools and principles needed for the conceptual analysis undertaken in chapters that follow. Next, it presents a detailed examination into existence, contingency, idealism, self-consciousness and natural laws. In the process, the author critically examines the conceptions of existence held by Kant, Frege and Russell; argues that the determinations of past, present and future are subjective in the sense that they imply the existence of consciousness in relation to which they are fixed; shows that every possible reality includes sufficient conditions for self-consciousness; and confronts the question of the "uniformity of nature," which states that reality is subject to natural laws. In the end, the idealistic conception of reality developed in this book implies that existence is relative, rather than absolute, in the sense that it is determined in relation to a point of view internal to reality. This view of existence implies that reality necessarily exists.