  Reism is the doctrine that only things exist. The name is derived from the Latin noun res (‘thing’). The interpretation of this very rough view depends on how things are understood. Reism was anticipated by many nominalists (that is, philosophers maintaining that only individuals exist) and materialists, particularly by the Stoics, medieval doctrines of singularia (particulars) or Hobbes’ considerations on corpora (bodies). Some tenets of reism are to be found in Leibniz. Brentano defended reism very strongly in his later philosophy, when he argued against entia rationis (objects of thought; he meant by this objects which exist in thought alone). Brentano became a reist in about 1904 and attracted to this position some of his younger followers (so-called younger Brentanists), like O. Kraus, A. Kastil and G. Katkov. The most developed version of reism can be credited to Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981), a Polish philosopher and one of the leading members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. He introduced the term ‘reism’ to denote the philosophical view that the category of things is the sole ontological category. In other words, reism reduces all categories to that of things. Yet reists differ in their views about what exactly is included in the category of things. For example, if one takes the Aristotelian table of categories (ten rubrics: substance, relation, etc.) the reist would say that substances interpreted as things are the only existents. Reism also has a semantic dimension, for it recommends that only singular names, that is, names referring to concrete things, should be used, and abstract words avoided. Eventually, one can use sentences with abstract words provided that they have translations into statements with singular terms.