Tropes and Things

This essay is a contribution to the recent ontological debate. The purpose is to reconstruct things from tropes and thereby to show that the category of object is not basic. The first section describes notorious puzzles of things some of which are attended to in the third section, especially the Riddle of Identity through Time and Change. The second section comprises an outline of my version of trope theory which I call an Ontology of Individual Qualities. This modal model is presented in an informal way and sketches the main principles, methods and tools of the intended ontological reconstruction.