Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals

ISBN-13: 9780199243778 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 245 str.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

Opis

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra offers a fresh philosophical account of properties. How is it that two different things (such as two red roses) can share the same property (redness)? According to resemblance nominalism, things have their properties in virtue of resembling other things. This unfashionable view is championed with clarity and rigor.

Recenzje

Dan Dennett's Philosophical Lexicon contains the entry: 'Exhume, v. to revive a position generally thought to be humed.' This book is the most brilliant philosophical exhumation that it has been my pleasure to encounter. This book argues that our attributions of properties and relations can be given satisfactory truthmakers using no more than resemblances holding between ordinary particulars. Many of us had assumed that this program is bankrupt, but now we must think again ... With patient and ingenious argument [Rodriguez-Pereyra] has shown that the theory has more to be said for it than ever I, and I suspect many others, had imagined. The fundamental nature of properties and relations may be the central question in metaphysics. He has made an important contribution to the topic.

O autorze

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra is Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford.