"Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences."
— A character clearly talking nonsense, from the National Library section of James Joyce's Ulysses
"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse."
— A thought of Stephen Dedalus in the same Ulysses section
For a representation of horseness related to Singer's dagger definitions in Saturday evening's post, see Generating the Octad Generator and Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art.
More seriously, Joyce's "horseness" is related to the problem of universals. For an illuminating approach to universals from a psychological point of view, see James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper Collins, 1977). (See particularly pages 154-157.)
