My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane—kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) elements and compounds. The other I will call the object-concept in the abstract sense of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege in their logico-semantical enquiries. The material object-concept constitutes the heart of our received logico/ontic system, still massively influenced by Aristotle after almost 2.5 millennia. On such an account, the fundamentality of material objects and their attributes are the metaphysical basis of the cosmos, as reflected in our received logic, Quine’s ‘canonical notation’—derived via the empiricism of Russell from Frege’s function-based Begriffschrifft, and consisting of concrete singular terms and variables, quantifiers and predicate-expressions. The inadequacy of Frege’s approach to understanding concepts is reflected in his initial question. Frege enquires of ‘what it is that we are calling an object’, remarking that he regards a regular definition as impossible: “we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis”. The imagined ultimacy or simplicity of the idea of a single object (arithmetically, just a unit—one as opposed to two, three, four, etc.) as foundational to the calculus is just that—imagined. It is also guaranteed to block the comprehension of the substance-concept.

中文翻译：

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物质的概念及其语言体现

我的目标是更好地理解两个理论上的基本概念。一是普通（非亚里士多德）意义上的物质概念，包括盐、碳、铜、铁、水和甲烷等现在被视为（化学）元素和化合物的物质。另一种我将称之为罗素、维特根斯坦和弗雷格在逻辑语义探究中抽象意义上的对象概念。物质对象概念构成了我们所接受的逻辑/本体系统的核心，在近 2500 年之后仍然深受亚里士多德的影响。在这样的解释下，物质对象及其属性的基本性是宇宙的形而上学基础，正如我们所接受的逻辑所反映的那样，蒯因的“规范符号”——通过罗素的经验主义从弗雷格基于函数的概念文献中导出，并由具体的单数术语和变量、量词和谓词表达式。弗雷格理解概念的方法的不足反映在他最初的问题中。弗雷格询问“我们称之为对象的是什么”，并指出他认为常规定义是不可能的：“我们这里的东西太简单了，无法进行逻辑分析”。作为微积分基础的单个对象（算术上来说，只是一个单位，一个而不是两个、三个、四个等）的概念的终极性或简单性只是想象的。它还保证会阻碍对实体概念的理解。