That is, a Stuff Ontology is any view which departs from Thing Theory in important respects so as to allow non-thing-like stuff to be part of the fundamental furniture of the world.
In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.
Hence, if 'something' refers to a thing at time t, it cannot refer to a non-thing at different time.
In this section we will examine views which posit non-thing-like stuff in addition to things, or eliminate things altogether.
He insists, in fact, that "Imagination is the widest known thing" because "it exercises its properties through its reality over every thing and non-thing.
Accordingly he faces the same difficulty that these others also had to face, i.e. determining the ontological status of such a thing (or non-thing).
In questioning conventional boundaries between thing and non-thing, Grosz's goal is not to completely collapse all distinctions between binary categories, but rather to complicate their relationships so that new possibilities might open up.
Therefore, this common cause, which Abelard calls the status[30] of those things to which it is common, is a cause, but it is a cause which is a non-thing.
Since these terms are not finite, they cannot be made infinite: "Terms that contain all things cannot be made infinite, hence this is senseless: 'a non-something is', 'a non-thing is'".
He allows that such ideas may be "true" in the sense of representing something positive in things, but that they may do so in such a way that "the reality which they represent is so extremely slight that I cannot even distinguish it from a non-thing" (7:44).
In Third Meditation, Descartes initially defines material falsity as something that "occurs in ideas, when they represent non-things as things" (7:43).
