The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means…and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of ‘good’.

But suppose we take the noun ‘truth’: here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation.

In one sense ‘there are’ both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder.

It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.

John Austin

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