Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Nominalism and Realism

  • The Use and Abuse of Occam’s Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity

    Self-styled neo-Aristotelian Richard Hennessey's response to my three posts concerning his theory of accidental predication is now online.  He graciously declines my suggestion that he make use of accidental compounds or accidental unities in his theory despite the excellent Aristotelian pedigree of these items, a pedigree amply documented in the writings of Frank Lewis and Gareth…

  • My Intentionality Aporia ‘Ockhamized’

    Edward of London proposes the following triad O1. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ can be true even when there are no nonexistent things.O2. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ expresses a relation between two things.O3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, all of its relata exist.…

  • A Reply to “Ockham’s Nominalism”

    The following is a response to "Ockham's Nominalism"  by our London sparring partner, Edward Ockham.  His words are in black, mine are in blue.  Comments are enabled. At this stage, I should discuss Peter Lupu’s objections (mostly in the extended comment on Vallicella’s blog here) to the nominalist program. I should first explain what I think…

  • Two Questions About the Bundle Theory Answered

    On the bundle-of-universals theory of ordinary concrete particulars, such a particular is a bundle of its properties and its properties are universals.  This theory will appeal to those who, for various ontological and epistemological reasons, resist substratum theories and think of properties as universals.  Empiricists like Bertrand Russell, for example.  Powerful objections can be brought…

  • The Hatfields and the McCoys

    Whether or not it is true, the following  has a clear sense: 1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys. (1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys.  It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy.  If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it…

  • Scholastic Realism and Predication

    This post continues our explorations in the philosophy of The School. What is a scholastic realist? John Peterson (Introduction to Scholastic Realism, Peter Lang, 1999, p. 6) defines a scholastic realist as follows: S is a scholastic realist =df i) S is a moderate realist and ii) S believes that universals exist in some transcendent…

  • Why not be a Nominalist?

    0. This post is a sequel to Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned. 1. On one acceptation of the term, a nominalist is one who holds that everything that exists is a concrete  individual.  Nominalists accordingly eschew such categories of entity as: universals, whether transcendent or immanent, Fregean propositions, Castaneda's ontological operators, mathematical sets, tropes (abstract particulars, perfect particulars), and…