  The interpretive dimension of modern philosophical analysis can also  be seen as anticipated in medieval scholasticism (see the  supplementary section on   Medieval Philosophy),  and it is remarkable just how much of modern concerns with  propositions, meaning, reference, and so on, can be found in the  medieval literature. Interpretive analysis is also illustrated in the nineteenth century by Bentham's conception of  paraphrasis, which he characterized as “that sort of  exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition,  having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not  for its subject any other than a fictitious entity”   [Full Quotation].  He applied the idea in ‘analyzing away’ talk of  ‘obligations’, and the anticipation that we can see here  of Russell's theory of descriptions has been noted by, among  others, Wisdom (1931) and Quine in ‘Five Milestones of  Empiricism’   [Quotation].  