[russellperry]

There's some Western philosophical precedents for this tack as well. Heraclitus comes to mind, later Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. William of Occam I suppose would never allow 'classes' at all, only radically individual one-off objects.

Two modern philosophers that I think may provide a better conceptual foundation for a less reified/Platonic/Aristotelian/Formalist view would be Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, both of whom described the ingression or duration of individual substances into other substances. Rather than hard borders (interfaces?) that interact in static and unchangeable ways, substances actually change each other at these borders. Bergson in particular I think would be interesting at many levels of the SDLC -- from emergent design (he advocated an 'emergent' fingertip-feel, intuitive approach to Science) to the nature of objects and hierachies.

What about the notion that an interface can change/morph according to the client that consumes it? This would move towards a more Heraclitean/Whiteheadean/Bergsonian paradigm.