Concept
Entity
Overview
anything that can be considered, discussed, or observed
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Thus I hold that substance and quality afford another instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Let us consider how the notions of substance and quality arise. We observe an object as an entity with certain characteristics. Furthermore, each individual entity is apprehended through its characteristics. For example, we observe a body; there is something about it which we note. Perhaps, it is hard, and blue…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
Names Entity several times; states what Entity is.
By reason of its occupation of space matter has extension. By reason of its extension each bit of matter is divisible into parts, and each part is a numerically distinct entity from every other such part. Accordingly it would seem that every material entity is not really one entity. It is an essential multiplicity of entities. There seems to be no stopping this dissociation of matter into multiplicities short of…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Names Entity several times; states what Entity is.
It may be the case that the relation which unites all those acts of direct apprehension which are mine, and which is what we mean to say that they have to one another when we say they are all mine, really does consist in the fact that one and the same entity is _what_ directly apprehends in each of them: in which case this entity could properly be called "me," and it _would_ be true to say that, when I see this…
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies
Names Entity several times; states what Entity is.
Philosophers who discussed Entity
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Agnosticism.