Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Letters to Varignon' and 'There Are No Abstract Objects'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

6 ideas

8. Modes of Existence / E. Nominalism / 1. Nominalism / c. Nominalism about abstracta
14596 Call 'nominalism' the denial of numbers, properties, relations and sets [Dorr]
     Full Idea: Just as there are no numbers or properties, there are no relations (like 'being heavier than' or 'betweenness'), or sets. I will provisionally use 'nominalism' for the conjunction of these four claims.
     From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 1)
     A reaction: If you are going to be a nominalist, do it properly! My starting point in metaphysics is strong sympathy with this view. Right now [Tues 22nd Nov 2011, 10:57 am GMT] I think it is correct.
8. Modes of Existence / E. Nominalism / 5. Class Nominalism
14597 Natural Class Nominalism says there are primitive classes of things resembling in one respect [Dorr]
     Full Idea: Natural Class Nominalists take as primitive the notion of a 'natural' class - a class of things that all resemble one another in some one respect and resemble nothing else in that respect.
     From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 4)
     A reaction: Dorr rejects this view because he doesn't believe in 'classes'. How committed to classes do you have to be before you are permitted to talk about them? All vocabulary (such as 'resemble') seems metaphysically tainted in this area.
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
14598 Abstracta imply non-logical brute necessities, so only nominalists can deny such things [Dorr]
     Full Idea: If there are abstract objects, there are necessary truths about these things that cannot be reduced to truths of logic. So only the nominalist, who denies that there are any such things, can adequately respect the idea that there are no brute necessities.
     From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 4)
     A reaction: This is where two plates of my personal philosophy grind horribly against one another. I love nominalism, and I love natural necessities. They meet like a ring-species in evolution. I'll just call it a 'paradox', and move on (swiftly).
26. Natural Theory / A. Speculations on Nature / 5. Infinite in Nature
1748 Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius]
     Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless.
     From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3
27. Natural Reality / G. Biology / 3. Evolution
5989 Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield]
     Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime.
     From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus
     A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea.
19414 Men are related to animals, which are related to plants, then to fossils, and then to the apparently inert [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: Men are related to animals, these to plants, and the latter directly to fossils which will be linked in their turn to bodies which the senses and the imagination represent to us as perfectly dead and formless.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Varignon [1702], 1702)
     A reaction: Leibniz would be a bit surprised to find the way in which this has turned out to be largely true, since he is basing it on his picture of a hierarchy of monads. Nevertheless, the idea that we are all related wasn't invented in 1859.