A BRIEF DISCOURSE ON REALISM AND NOMINALISM

In this paper, written for metaphysical novices, I lay out my own fast track route from how to introduce the problem of universals in the first place to scepticism about the particular-universal distinction itself via issues about nominalism, realism and the problem of relations.

Universals in this monograph are examined in their original medieval context. From this context the ontological and metaphysical status of universals are re-examined. Idea(l)s, symbols, and objects or matter were reckoned as absolutes or hypostases exclusive or preeminent of one another. This thesis supplies an alternative solution to the problem of universals in which all three elements mentioned above are rendered into a unified philosophical system with axioms, methods, and goals. Church, State, and Academia are denied as the source of authority regarding universals. The veritable efficacy of reality is asserted as the basis all epistemological and metaphysical claims and upon which all reliance should be placed.

2015

Nominalism, which has its origins in the Middle Ages and continues into the Twenty-First Century, is the doctrine that there are no universals. This book is unique in bringing together essays on the history of nominalism and essays that present a systematic discussion of nominalism. It introduces the reader to the distinction between particulars and universals, to the difficulties posed by this distinction, and to the main motivations for the rejection of universals. It also describes the main varieties of nominalism about properties and provides tools to understand how they developed in the history of Western Philosophy. All essays are new and are written by experts on the topic, and they advance the discussion about nominalism to a new level.

Philosophical Studies, 1975

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior, 2010

The three-day conference opened in the afternoon of July, 5 and, after taking a quick look at the programme and the names of the important thinkers standing out on it, one could have expected to find a crowded audience room. Actually that was not quite the case.

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1996

Standard interpretations identify the nominalist-realist debate with the question: Are universals real? Peirce too puts the debate in these terms. In this paper I show that in spite of that, this is not what Peirce thinks the debate is about. The real issue is not that nominalists and realists answer the question whether universals are real differently, but that both sides have a different conception of reality. This the question does not touch. On the contrary, it takes for granted that both parties mean the same thing when they use the term "real."

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2017

The paper deals with the theory of universals of Sebastian Izquierdo (1601–1681), a Spanish Jesuit author working in Rome, as he formulated and defended it in Disputation 17 of his major philosophical work The Lighthouse of Sciences (Pharus scientiarum), published in Lyon in 1659. Izquierdo’s discussion centers around three questions: What is universality? Is there some intellect-independent universality? What is the nature of the intellect-dependent universality? Izquierdo’s approach may be seen as a search for the third way between the (moderate) realism of the Thomists and the Scotists and the (conceptualist) nominalism of some Jesuits such as Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641).

Joseph LaPorte, Genoveva Martí and Nathan Salmon have argued that general terms, natural kind terms in particular, are semantically akin to proper names. They have singular reference, they designate individuals. The most plausible candidates for these designata are abstract universals. So the “designation theory” of general terms favours the doctrine of abstract universals. However, in this paper we argue that this preference involves serious metaphysical problems. Both contemporary doctrines of abstract universals, the Russellian and Neo-Aristotelian, suffer from the problem that they cannot give a theoretically satisfactory account of instantiation of universals by particulars. Hence we conclude that notwithstanding its theoretical appeal owing to its elegant simplicity, the designation theory of general terms ought to be reconsidered.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2009

Nominalism is usually formulated as the thesis that only concrete entities exist or that no abstract entities exist. But where, as here, the interest is primarily in philosophy of mathematics, one can bypass the tangled question of how, exactly, the general abstract/concrete distinction is to be understood by taking nominalism simply as the thesis that there are no distinctively mathematical objects: no numbers, sets, functions, groups, and so on. As to the nature of such objects (if there are any), it can be said that it has come to be fairly widely agreed, under the influence of Frege and others, that they are very different both from paradigmatically physical objects (bricks, stones) and from paradigmatically mental ones (minds, ideas). Modern nominalism emerged in the 1930s as a response to the view of Frege and others that numbers, sets, functions, groups, and so on belong to a “third realm.”