the.com/entity
Philosophy's way of saying 'thing' when 'thing' feels too casual for the sentence.
means Something that exists as a distinct, identifiable unit, whether physical, abstract, or institutional.
from From Latin 'entitas,' built on 'ens,' the present participle of 'esse' — 'to be.' Medieval scholastic philosophers coined it to have a noun for sheer existence itself, something that simply 'is-ing.' It entered English in the 1500s already dressed in academic robes, and it never really took them off.
- legal use
- corporations are entities, which is why they can sue you
- etymology
- from latin ens, meaning simply being
- database use
- a row in a table pretending to matter philosophically
- vagueness
- used precisely because you refuse to specify what something is