Books

Abstract

This paper is about books, more precisely, mostly about their ontology. I use the term book throughout though just as shorthand for arbitrary document types. Books might seem an odd topic since everybody sort of knows what they are. But this everyday idea obscures at least two mysteries. The first involves the relation of the notion book to that of abstract object. The standard view is that abstract objects, things like numbers and propositions, exist neither in space nor time and cannot enter into causal relations. The very view that there are such things as abstract objects is, of course, highly controversial.