Statement and Referent: An Inquiry into the Foundations of our Conceptual Order

Plato’s Parmenides and Aristotle’s Metaphysics initiated the discussion of the “First Philosophy” in the Western canon. Here, David Shwayder continues this debate by considering statements as the fundamental bearers of truth-values. Systematically moving from action to utterance, Shwayder argues that the category of “bodies” is fundamental to the human scheme of conceptualization and that if we had no capacity to refer to bodies then we would be unable to address referents from other categories.