Copied from the above referenced site:

"(iii) Existence is not a property of individuals, but rather a higher-order property, identical with the property of having an instance."

Question: do individuals, then, have any properties? It seems they must not.

How does this line of inquiry escape being merely a word-game?

To the OP: can you develop the argument a bit more substantially?

I don't have an opinion here. I am totally neutral.

Hi. Not looking for advocacy, but substance, something to chew on and maybe chew up. Implicitly you have some knowledge of this topic that I do not. I have looked at the paper; it seems an exercise in hair-splitting semantics of the kind that says, if I define this this way and that that way - never mind if they make sense - then I get "interesting" results. Conveniently forgetting that the "interesting" results are an artifact of idiosyncratic definitions.

I've never been at all convinced that the distinction of first and second (and higher) order properties even makes any sense.

Part of the reason why stems from my nominalism. In my view, only particulars exist, and properties are simply the qualities of those particulars. Properties aren't something separate from material particulars and their (particular) dynamic relations. (And likewise, material particulars and their dynamic relations aren't separate from properties somehow--the idea of that is nonsensical--you can't have a particular without it having qualities, without it being some way or other, and you can't have qualities or being some way or other without something (some particular) that is that way)

So the upshot of that is that "properties having properties" is no different than a particular having properties, since properties ARE identical to particulars and vice versa.

Hence I don't really think that the distinction makes sense..