What does Plato mean in saying that, for all forms, “F-ness is F”? In such claims, I argue, ‘F’ is being used metonymically to refer to the property of being productive of F-ness rather than to the property of being F, in a way consistent with univocity and the rejection of a genuine Self-Predication Assumption. I explain and defend this productive metonymy reading and show how it can resolve the troubling argument at Phaedo 74b7-c6.

Since gregory vlastos resurrected "self-predication" there justifiably has been considerable interest in "self-predication," and the interpretation of this notion is crucial for understanding plato's metaphysics. I am in agreement with vlastos in thinking that plato's degrees-of-reality ontology and his conception of forms as paradigms implies "self-predication." Nevertheless, many of plato's "self-predicational" statements (e.g., "the beautiful is beautiful," "justice is just," etc.) Arise, i believe, from a different source. Plato, at times, accepts an anaxagorean (...) account of causation: a cause must have the quality that it produces in something else. I argue that anaxagorean causation lies behind the apparently "self- predicational" statements at "parmenides" 131 c-e, "euthydemus" 301b, "hippias major" 292e, "protagoras" 330 c,e, and "phaedo" 100c. These statements are, i believe, on a par with an ethical motif of the dialogues– that a man (or the demiurge) must have the quality that he produces in another; e.g., Only a just man can make another man just. (shrink)

The paper addresses the widely held position that the Third Man regress in the Parmenides is caused at least in part by the self-predicational aspect of Plato's Ideas. I offer a critique of the logic behind this type of interpretation, and argue that if the Ideas are construed as genuinely applying to themselves, then the regress is dissolved. Furthermore, such an interpretation can be made technically precise by modeling Platonic Universals as non-wellfounded sets. This provides a solution to the (...) Third Man regress, and allows a consistent reading of both self-predication and the singularity of the respective Forms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Predication and the "Third Man" Argument ROGER A. SHINER 1.1. IN COMMPm'mO on the 'Third Man' Argument (TMA), Proclus z produces the following line of thought. He argues that. if the relation of resemblance between Form and particular were symmetrical, the argument in question would be valid; the relation is not, however, symmetrical. Where a Form and particular are both alike, have the quality of likeness, the (...) likeness of that which is derived is not the same as the likeness of that from which it is derived, just because of the former's derivatory nature. Consequently, ~k tt~v ala01]x~ bttotoi3c0at ~re[vot~ (sc. xo~ ~Semv), abx~ 8~ xo6~ot~ oSr~xt, 'the sensible particulars resemble the Forms, but they are not in the same relation of resemblance to the particulars' (ibid., 913.29-30). That is to say, the bare relation of similarity may be symmetrical, but the relation of a similar copy to a similar original is not; the copy is 'a copy of' the original, but the original/s not 'a copy of' the copy. This way of defending the Theory of Forms against the TMA I shall for purposes of identification call the 'Ontological Defence'. It lays stress on the ontological difference between Form and particular in order to avoid the fatal implication that the relation between them is symmetrical. If we use the language of predication, the point is as follows: the TMA is valid, if the Forms have a given term predicated of them severally in exactly the same sense as it is predicated of their respective dependent particulars. This, however, is not the case, for the quality in virtue of which a given term is predicated of a given Form differs in ontological status from the quality in virtue of which that term is predicated of that Form's dependent particulars. Thus we see that underlying the Ontological x I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper to Professor Gilbert Ryle, Professor John F. Malcolm and two anonymous readers for this Journal. Since this paper went to press, the following relevant articles have appeared: G. Vlastos, "'Self Predication' in Plato's Later Period," Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969), 74-78, and "Plato's 'Third Man' Argument (Parm. 132al-b2): Text and Logic," Philosophical Quarterly, XIX (1969), 289-301; K. W. Rankin, "The Duplicity of Plato's Third Man," Mind, LXXVIII (1969), 178-197; T. O. Smith, "'The Theory of Forms, Relations and Infinite Regress," Dialogue, VIII (1969), 116-123. 2 Proelus, In Platonis Parmenidem, ed. V. Cousin, Paris, 1864; 912.27 ft. [3711 372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Defence is the following assumption--the fact that the Forms are self-predicating only causes problems for the Theory of Forms, if a given Form F and its corresponding particulars, a set of f things, have 'F' predicated of them univocally, are F in precisely the same sense. My thesis in this paper is that this latter assumption is false, it is, rather, quite sufficient for the Self-Predication Assumption (SPA) to be vicious, if 'F' is predicated of both Form and particular not equivocally. This is not the same as 'univocally', and furthermore it is not possible that Plato could have thought of the predication of a term of both Form and particular as equivocal, the only alternative left to him to escape the TMA. The SPA, therefore, is required for the Theory of Forms to make sense, and leads to an ineradicable defect in that Theory. 1.2. One minor terminological point must be noted before we proceed. There are two versions of the TMA in the Parmenides; the first runs from 131eS-132b2, and the second from 132c11-133a7. The second of these explicitly employs the language of copy-resemblance, 7mpdS~tytm ('paradigm'), 6lxoio)tta ('likeness'), ~tKao0~vat ('resemble') as an explication of ~t~0e~tq ('participation'): the first employs the lan~.,uage of cttx6 ~ xai3xa.., eIvat ('that by which things are...'), which, as Plato has already indicated (Phaedo 100d6-8), is deliberatety noncommittal as to the relation between Forms and particulars. I shall refer to the first argument as TMA(1) and the second... (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of self-Predication (the idea that justice is just) in plato, Given that self-Predication is accepted as obvious both by plato and by his audience, Which entails that "all" self-Predications are clearly, Though not trivially, True. More strongly, It is suggested that "only" self-Predications can be accepted as clearly true by plato. This is to deny that plato had at his disposal an articulated notion of predication, And his middle (...) theory of forms, Primarily the relation of participation, Is seen as his attempt to arrive at that notion. It is argued that his metaphysical and semantical views are heavily influenced by eleatic monism. But this monism is incompatible with the very idea of predication. It is only in his later works, Where he attacks parmenides directly, That plato manages to lay the groundwork for what can be considered as the discovery of predication. (shrink)

A major problem in the interpretation of Plato's metaphysics is the question of whether he abandoned self-predication as a result of the Third Man Argument in the Parmenides. In this paper I will argue that the answer to this question must be 'no' because the self-predication assumption is still present in the Sophist.

An interpretation of Plato's earlier dialogues which argues that the few cases of self-predication contained therein are acceptable simply as statements concerning universals and that therefore Plato is not vulnerable in these cases to the "third man argument".

1. Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept advances a theory of conceptual determinacy. As I will demonstrate, Hegel’s theory of conceptual determinacy leads him to endorse self-predication and existential...

In Plato's "Hippias Major" 292e6-7, we can find a self-predication sentence; "The fine is always fine." (We have similar expressions in "Protagoras" 330c4-6, 330d8-el, "Lysis" 220b6-7.) How should we interpret this sentence? We cannot give it any metaphysical meaning drawn from Plato's own theory of Form, which is explicit in his middle dialogues. "The fine" here should be the logical cause, not the one of the metaphysical essentials (cf. Paul Woodruff's "Plateo Hippias Major", p. 150). So taking a (...) sentence like "parthenos kale kalon" (287e4), we can safely paraphrase it in Woodruff's manner: "a fine girl is a fine thing." This can avoid reading the metaphysical meaning into the text. And I would like to make a new proposal for reading of 292e6-7: "the fine thing is what is to be called fine." This is to emphasize the unique character of the self-predication sentences in the early dialogues. In the Socratic way of discourse, Socrates and his partner get involved into "trial and error" during their pursuit of the knowledge. What they can do then is to give their opinions which seem to them true (so-called alethes doxa", cf. "Meno" 85c), and to get close examinations of them. And in this way they are getting closer to the knowledge. My interpretation well describes these activities. (shrink)

This article shows that Plato is discussing Pauline predication and Pauline self-predication in the Phaedo. The key is the recognition that the “something else” of Phaedo 103e2-5 cannot be a sensible object because any such object which participates in Form ‘X’ can sometimes appear not to be x. It is argued that Plato has not written in a straightforward manner, but rather has written a series of riddles for the reader to solve. Thus this dialogue is an (...) example of the playful use of the written word discussed at Phaedrus 275ff. (shrink)

Plato believes in the existence of Forms—eternal models or exemplars of which objects in our world in time and space are copies, and his Theory of Forms lies at the center of his philosophy. But according to the common wisdom, Plato raised the Third Man objection against his own Theory of Forms in the Parmenides. According to this objection, each Form is supposed to have the very characteristic it is supposed to be , and this leads to an infinite regress (...) of each Form . This book defends the view that a mysterious plural phrase at Phaedo 74 shows that the Self-Predication Assumption is both plausible and leads to no infinite regress of Forms. The Self-Predication Assumption in Plato is an essential resource for scholars, specialists, and students with an interest in ancient philosophy and classics. (shrink)

Malcolm argues that all middle-dialogue Platonic Forms are at the same time universals and self-predicating in that they are paradigm cases. This renders them vulnerable to the Third Man argument. Early-dialogue Forms, by contrast, exemplify themselves only when it is legitimate for them to do so, and are therefore exempted from the Third Man. Beauty, for example, may reasonably be supposed to be a beautiful thing "as a general nature", and this exemplification, Malcolm argues, gives no hold to the (...) nonidentity that generates the Third Man. In the middle dialogues, however, Plato is wrong to take Forms as both universals and paradigm cases. The source of this trouble is not the logico-linguistic error of confusing the name of a Form with its description, but Plato's failure to distinguish two types of things that may be called Forms: the universal F and perfectly F things. (shrink)

Generations of scholars have worked to clarify the structure and content of the TMA, one of the most famous arguments in the history of philosophy. Though progress has been made, I show that a premise crucial to the argument has yet to be stated openly. This premise holds the way out of the predicament that enables Plato to retain intact the foundations of the Theory of Forms.

This paper shows how the universals of category theory in mathematics provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. The paper also shows how the always-self-predicative universals of category theory provide the "opposite bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of iterative set theory and thus that the paradoxes (...) arose from having one theory (e.g., Frege's Paradise) where universals could be either self-predicative or non-self-predicative (instead of being always one or always the other). (shrink)

In Proclus, like in Plato, we find statements about the Forms that at least appear to allow self-predication of Forms. In his discussion of the Parmenides’s Third Man Argument, however, Proclus argues that Forms and their participants are not synonymous, which means that the property that the Form causes in its participants cannot be predicated of the Form itself. In this paper, I try to show how such seemingly self-predicative statements about the Forms are to be understood (...) in the context of Proclus’ metaphysics. I will argue that, in Proclus, statements such as ‘ the Form of Large is truly Large’ should be considered what I will call ‘causal predications’. Causal predication does not attribute any property to a subject, but only concerns the subject’s causal efficacy in relation to that property. (shrink)

This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help (...) a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them. (shrink)

Abstract:Bipolar or related disorders (BoRD) present unique practical and existential problems for people who live with them. All agents experience changes in the things they care about over time. However people living with BoRD face drastic shifts in what seems valuable to them, which upset their longitudinal values (if, indeed, any stable longitudinal values are available in the first place). Navigating these evaluative high seas presents agents living with BoRD with a distinctive existential question, not shared by those on calmer (...) waters. I draw out two contrasting ways in which someone living with BoRD might seek to support their self-determination in these circumstances, by crafting appropriate self care and support regimes. The first strategy involves managing one’s affective episodes so that they do not interrupt one’s plans and long-term agency over time. The second involves a regimen that allows one the greatest degree of freedom in adapting to changes in one’s experiences of value. What distinguishes these sorts of self-determination is the scope at which they are predicated. Although both sorts of self-determination allow an individual to rule themselves, they alter the overall shape of one’s autonomy in quite different ways. (shrink)

Terminologically, the “topos of mu” and the “predicative self” originated in the Kyoto School and are traceable to the work of its founder NISHIDA Kitarō. The full phrase was coined by NAKAMURA Yūjirō. Conceptually, the topos of mu or place of nothingness is Nishida’s development of the Buddhist notion of anatta or no self and radiating out from that locus of emptiness is a self constituted by its predicates or the things to which it is connected by (...) an existential copula. Deeply ingrained in Western languages, metaphysics, and religion is the subjective self, in both the linguistic and psychological senses of “subjective.” That Buddhism, as reworked by the Kyota School, or Daoism, or any other non-Western tradition of thought, will catch on in the West was a puerile fantasy of some members of the first generation of environmental philosophers. There is a good chance, however, that the Western worldview may evolve toward a similar conception of the self—as ecological, relational, or systems thinking becomes ever more ingrained. We in the West may come to understand that we are constituted by our social and environmental relationships, in which we are deeply embedded and on which we are utterly dependent, such that world care is the essence of self-help. (shrink)

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop a language containing plural predicates . ;The introduction of plural predicates leads to an extension of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. I argue that (...) theories containing plural predicates can have plural ontological commitments in addition to singular ones. In this sense, I argue that the subject-matter of ontology is richer than one might have thought. ;Plural predicates turn out to be tremendously fruitful. For example, they provide us with natural formalizations for English plural definite descriptions and generalized quantifiers. They also allow us to state important set theoretic propositions, and give a formal semantics for second-order languages. Such a formal semantics is developed in the second paper, 'Toward a Theory of Second-Order Consequence', which is a collaboration with Gabriel Uzquiano. ;In the third paper, 'Frege's Unofficial Arithmetic', I consider an application of plural predicates to the philosophy of mathematics. By developing a suggestion of the later Frege, I show that any arithmetical predicate can be transformed into a plural predicate in such a way that the arithmetical predicate is true of the number of the Fs just in case the plural predicate is true of the Fs themselves. ;The transformation is important both because it can be put to use by nominalists about arithmetic and neo-Fregeans, and because it provides the foundations for an account of applied arithmetic. (shrink)

Problems about the accidental properties of properties motivate us--force us, I think--not to identify properties with the sets of their instances. If we identify them instead with functions from worlds to extensions, we get a theory of properties that is neutral with respect to disputes over counterpart theory, and we avoid a problem for Lewis's theory of events. Similar problems about the temporary properties of properties motivate us--though this time they probably don't force us--to give up this theory as well, (...) and to identify properties with functions from ⟨world, time⟩ pairs to extensions. Again, the replacement theory is neutral with respect to a metaphysical dispute that the old theory (arguably) forces us to take a stand on--the dispute over whether objects have temporal parts. It also allows us to give a smoother semantics for predication, to better accommodate our intuitions about which objects temporary properties are properties of, and to make temporally self-locating beliefs genuinely self -locating. (shrink)

The self-ownership thesis asserts, roughly, that agents own their minds and bodies in the same way that they can own extra-personal property. One common strategy for defending the self-ownership thesis is to show that it accords with our intuitions about the wrongness of various acts involving the expropriation of body parts. We challenge this line of defense. We argue that disgust explains our resistance to these sorts of cases and present results from an original psychological experiment in support (...) of this hypothesis. We argue further that learning that disgust is responsible for pro-self-ownership intuitions should reduce our confidence in those intuitions. After considering and rejecting some prominent “debunking” arguments predicated on disgust’s evolutionary history, we provide alternative reasons for thinking that disgust is not a reliable source of moral judgments. Rejecting the reliability of disgust as a mechanism for producing moral beliefs coheres with our considered judgments about the general kinds of considerations that are morally relevant and a range of particular moral problems. (shrink)

All the known non-self-referential paradoxes share a reference pattern of Yablo’s paradox in that they all necessarily contain infinitely many sentences, each of which refers to infinitely many sentences. This raises a question: Does the reference pattern of Yablo’s paradox underlie all non-self-referential paradoxes, just as the reference pattern of the liar paradox underlies all finite paradoxes? In this regard, Rabern et al. [J Philos Logic 42(5): 727–765, 2013] prove that every dangerous acyclic digraph contains infinitely many points (...) with an infinite out-degree. Building upon their work, this paper extends Rabern et al.’s result to the first-order arithmetic language with a primitive truth predicate, proving that all reference digraphs for non-self-referential paradoxes contain infinitely many sentences of infinite out-degree (called “social sentences”). We then strengthen this result in two respects. First, among these social sentences, infinitely many appear in one ray. Second, among these social sentences, infinitely many have infinitely many out-neighbors, none of which will eventually get to a sink. These observations provide helpful information towards the following conjecture proposed by Beringer and Schindler [Bull. of Symb. Logic 23(4): 442–492, 2017]: every dangerous acyclic digraph contains the Yablo digraph as a finitary minor. (shrink)

Two connected themes have been at the core of the old perplexity regarding thinking and speaking about non-existent objects. One involves a question of reference. Can we refer to non-existent objects without, thereby, recognizing, in some sense, non-existent entities as objects of reference? The other involves a question about existence. Is existence a property representable by a predicate in a logically adequate symbohsm? It is argued (1) that existence is not to be construed as an attribute represented by a predicate, (...) (2) that nonnaming names introduce problems, not solutions to problems, (3) that purported properties such as self-identical are specious, and (4) that the Russell property is also seen to be specious by our consideration of predication. (shrink)

This paper uses self-relation to reconstruct Hegel's reasoning in the Logic. In the sphere of "being," selfrelation is self-predication, and the predicate is the active, participial form of the category. Examining the first three and the last category in this sphere, I explain how Hegel argues that each category is itself engaged in the activity that it signifies. However, this self-predication adds new content to the category transforming it into a new category. Ultimately, this process (...) leads to the collapse of "being" into "essence." Categories in this later sphere exhibit a different kind of self-relation : each contains its relation to itself as an activity that negates itself and then, negating this negation, returns to itself. Hegel's analysis at the beginning of "essence" is, I argue, parallel to Kant's "Transcendental Deduction," but relations among categories replace the transcendental ego. The significance of self-relation is that it (1) effects transitions to new categories by an internal mechanism, thereby (2) allowing the Logic to be a self-exposition of the categories that (3) avoids an external (Kantian) transcendental ground. (shrink)

As ardent followers of Mencius and Zhu Xi, virtually all Korean Neo-Confucians during the Chosŏn dynasty rejected the Way of the Hegemon by understanding it as directly opposed to the Kingly Way, a humane government allegedly conducted by ancient sage-kings. However, Yi I [Formula: see text]珥 (1536–1584), a prominent Neo-Confucian scholar-official in sixteenth-century Korea, endorsed the Way of the Hegemon as compatible with the Kingly Way by reconceptualizing it, otherwise predicated on strong consequentialist ethics, in a way consistent with Confucianism’s (...) deepest concern with the well-being of the people. In Confucianizing the Way of the Hegemon through the creative re-reading of the Book of Rites from a Xunzian standpoint, Yi I proposed a new method of moral self-cultivation specifically tailored for a Confucian ruler—called political self-cultivation in this paper—that combined the traditional Neo-Confucian recovery model of self-cultivation with a strong sense of political responsibility. (shrink)

In an attempt to accommodate natural language phenomena involving nominalization and self-application, various researchers in formal semantics have proposed abandoning the hierarchical type system which Montague inherited from Russell, in favour of more flexible type regimes. We briefly review the main extant proposals, and then develop a new approach, based semantically on Aczel's notion of Frege structure, which implements a version ofsubsumption polymorphism. Nominalization is achieved by virtue of the fact that the types of predicative and propositional complements are (...) contained in the type of individuals. Russell's paradox is avoided by placing a type-constraint on lambda-abstraction, rather than by restricting comprehension. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the descriptive analogue of self-location. It argues that if a language contains predicates that apply to the properties it exemplifies, and it contains reflexive expressions that identify those properties, we have the makings of self-describing sentences that do for its descriptive vocabulary what self-locating acts do for spatial vocabulary.

Two connected themes have been at the core of the old perplexity regarding thinking and speaking about non-existent objects. One involves a question of reference. Can we refer to non-existent objects without, thereby, recognizing, in some sense, non-existent entities as objects of reference? The other involves a question about existence. Is existence a property representable by a predicate in a logically adequate symbohsm? It is argued (1) that existence is not to be construed as an attribute represented by a predicate, (...) (2) that nonnaming names introduce problems, not solutions to problems, (3) that purported properties such as self-identical are specious, and (4) that the Russell property is also seen to be specious by our consideration of predication. (shrink)

This paper is a continuation of a long line of footnotes to discussions of the ontological argument which began with Ayer, Wisdom, and Broad, and then progressed through Nakhnikian, Salmon, and Kiteley. In this series, one of the major theses proposed by the first trio and queried by the second is that, if existence is indeed a predicate, then all positive existential statements become analytic and all negative existentials self-contradictory. I should like to question this claim from yet another (...) perspective than that of the more recent writers, viz., that of essential predication. Since it is the so-called second version of the proof which is allegedly more cogent, such a perspective is after all much closer to the core of the ontological argument. Though the remarks here are presented only with regard to positive existentials, they are nevertheless applicable to negative existentials, mutatis mutandis, as well. (shrink)

The general consensus emerging from decades of empirical investigation of metaphor processing is that, when appropriately contextualised, metaphorically used language is no more demanding of processing effort than literally used language. However, there is a small number of studies which contradict this position, notably Noveck, Bianco, and Castry (2001): they maintain that relevance-based pragmatic theory predicts increased cognitive costs incurred in deriving the extra effects that metaphors typically yield, and they provide experimental results that support this prediction. In our study, (...) we first surveyed and assessed the tasks and stimulus materials of many experiments on metaphor processing from the 1970's to the present day. The most telling result was an apparent disparity between the processing of metaphorical language used predicatively versus referentially. We then ran two self-paced reading experiments to test our hypothesis that when used as a predicate, metaphorical language is no more costly than literal language, but when used referentially, it does incur extra costs, even given a preceding biasing context. In the first experiment, all metaphorical referring expressions were in subject position so occurred early in the sentence; in the second experiment, we controlled for any effect of sentence position by placing metaphorical referring expressions in object position, thus later in the sentence, similar to the predicate metaphors. In both cases, metaphorical referring incurred significantly greater costs relative to literal equivalents than did metaphorical predication, with no effect of sentence position. We end with a brief analysis of why the referential use of metaphor is special and effort-demanding. (shrink)

In this thesis I focus on F. H. Bradley's theory of judgment and his doctrine of predication. My goal is to present an account of Bradley's views which pays special attention to his belief that all logical predication must necessarily fail to accomplish what it sets out to do. All assertion , we are told, attempts to state truth, whole and complete; but, in the end, it must fall short. All judgment, Bradley claims, must contain an element of (...) untruth or falsity. And the outcome of this theory of predication is a doctrine of "degrees of truth". No truth is understood as entirely true or entirely false; rather, each has a position in a hierarchy of truths with some being truer than others when measured against the theoretical criterion of absolute knowledge. ;But, this is not to be understood as a sceptical doctrine. I argue that Bradley's doctrine of predicative failure should be seen as the only means by which radical scepticism in the theory of knowledge can be avoided. If we were capable of possessing truths which are whole and complete unto themselves then there would exist no legitimate basis upon which the inferential development of thought could expand beyond a self-enclosed circle. ;In this essay I also examine a persisting historical problem. It is my claim that Bradley's theory should be understood as a continuation of and development within the British neo-Kantian tradition. Bradley's association with this tradition has sometimes been questioned based on scattered statements found in the 1883 edition of the Principles of Logic. Collectively these statements have been referred to as the doctrine of "floating ideas". However, I maintain that the doctrine of floating ideas must be distinguished from the theory of predicative failure . I argue that the two theories should in no way be identified and that certain misinterpretations of Bradley's position have resulted from confusing these two incompatible views. (shrink)