Interest in the age-old problems of universals and individuation has received a new impetus from the current revival of ontology in the analytic tradition, the development of theories of individual properties (and the related application of mereological calculi to the analysis of predication), and the particular problems posed by relational predication and the nature of particulars. The essays explore aspects of the history of the issues and attempt to deal with the issues and with challenges to the distinctions that give rise to them. They continue the debates stemming from the revival of metaphysics rooted in Freges realism, the Austrian tradition of Brentano-Husserl-Meinong, and the early 20th century revolt against idealism embodied in writings of Moore and Russell and culminating in Wittgensteins Tractatus.

Philosophy took a "linguistic turn" in the twentieth century that was marked by the focus on theories of meaning, reference, description, predication and truth. Starting with the roots of the analytic tradition in Frege, Meinong and Bradley, this book follows its development in Russell and Wittgenstein and the writings of major philosophers of the analytic tradition and of various lesser, but well known and widely discussed, contemporary figures. In dealing with basic issues that have preoccupied analytic philosophers in the past century, the author notes how analytic philosophy is sometimes transformed from its original concern with careful and precise formulations of classical issues into the dismissal of such issues and the resultant spinning of intricate verbal webs, often signaling the rebirth of idealism in the guises of "contextualism" and "anti-realism." The book thus examines the change that came to dominate the analytic tradition by a shift of focus from the world, as what words are about, to a preoccupation with language itself.