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"Nominalism"
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Peirce and the threat of nominalism
\"Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, was a thinker of extraordinary depth and range - he wrote on philosophy, mathematics, psychology, physics, logic, phenomenology, semiotics, religion and ethics - but his writings are difficult and fragmentary. This book provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of Peirce's thought. His philosophy is presented as a systematic response to 'nominalism', the philosophy which he most despised and which he regarded as the underpinning of the dominant philosophical worldview of his time. The book explains Peirce's challenge to nominalism as a theory of meaning and shows its implications for his views of knowledge, truth, the nature of reality, and ethics. It will be essential reading both for Peirce scholars and for those new to his work\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Use Value and Time Value Through the Lens of Money Functions
The decision of the House of Lords in Sempra Metals Ltd. v. Inland Revenue Commissioners 2007 adopted compound interest as the measure of damages for the time period that claimant was deprived of the opportunity to use money. A decade later, the Supreme Court in the Littlewoods v. HMRC, 2017, deferred to statutory simple interest. The majority in Prudential Assurance Company Ltd. v. HMRC, 2018, said that the use value in Sempra is a free-standing cause of action but did not rule on the matter. PAC asserted that the claim to interest is one that is based on the failure to pay a debt by its due date. A close examination of these cases reveals that the theory underpinning the debt analysis is to treat money being held for its use value relative to its function as unit of account, which employs the nominalist view that money has a constant store value, whereas the use value in Sempra treats money being held for its use value relative to its function as a medium ofexchange.
Journal Article
EVERYDAY FREEDOM
[...]if the children are black or fall under another category protected in civil rights law, adults are doubly cautious, eager to avoid even the appearance of failing to respect diversity or violating the imperative of inclusion. Howard is right about human beings. When a group of strangers succeeds in freeing a car stuck in the snow, they high-five over their success. [...]people tread carefully and minimize close interactions and cooperation with strangers, contact that can be difficult, awkward, and fraught, given our fallen state. A culture of freedom champions virtue and holds accountable those in positions of authority.
Journal Article
THE POSSIBILITY OF PHYSICALISM
It has been suggested that many philosophical theses--physicalism, nominalism, normative naturalism, and so on--should be understood in terms of ground. Against this, Ted Sider has argued that ground is ill-suited for this purpose. Here, Dasgupta develops Sider's objection and offers a response.
Journal Article
La pregunta por la forma en la música sinfónica de Oscar Strasnoy
La reintroducción de los géneros, así como la diversificación de procedimientos intertextuales en la música de concierto a partir de los años setenta del siglo XX, dio lugar a un intenso debate respecto de sus orientaciones estéticas e históricas. El artículo analiza dos obras del compositor argentino Oscar Strasnoy, Sum (2005-11), cuatro piezas para orquesta sinfónica; y Trois caprices de Paganini (2011), concierto para violín y orquesta. Se propone que el recurso a la historia se inscribe, en este caso, en una orientación modernista, como un nominalismo estético que desprende las obras de sus contextos (históricos o estilísticos), identificando elementos de modernidad en las expresiones del pasado, que entran en diálogo con el pensamiento musical contemporáneo.
Journal Article
Formal Issues of Trope-Only Theories of Universals
The paper discusses some formal difficulties concerning the theory of universals of Trope-Only ontologies, from which the formal theory of predication advanced by Trope-Only theorists seems to be irremediably affected. It is impossible to lay out a successful defense of a Trope-Only theory without Russellian types, but such types are ontologically inconsistent with tropes’ nominalism. Historically, Tropists’ first way to avoid the problem is appealing to the supervenience claim, which however fails on its terms and, thus, fails as a ground for a solution to the higher-order or ‘type’ problem. A later solution involves the invariance of primitive equivalence relations in order to make universals ontologically innocuous. However, I argue that this latter solution fails to meet the requirements imposed on an ontologically unbiased nominalist attitude. So, this paper discusses how Trope-Only theories alter standard formal moves in Nominalism, and also is interested in clarifying further the formal assumptions for these problems.
Journal Article
“A Not Unworthy Record”?: Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam's 1901 Census of Ceylon and the Transforming of Dynamic Nominalism
Drawing inspiration from Ian Hacking's claim that new modes of description generate new possibilities for action, this essay explores the impact of changes to the mode of description through the 1901 Census in Ceylon. It begins by exploring the modes of description used in the censuses prior to 1901 to demonstrate that in Ceylon, the census was yet to emerge as the critical tool of colonial governance claimed by dominant scholarship around colonial census taking. This leads to an exploration of how the changes that Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the first Ceylonese Census superintendent, made to the Census Ordinance, Census Manual, and Census Report impacted the function of the census as a mode of description. It then explores the possibilities for action generated by these changes in the mode of description, paying particular attention to the ways in which the census shaped elite, indigenous activism leading to the first major reforms of the colonial governance structure in Ceylon, including the introduction of limited franchise. Thus, Ceylon's 1901 Census affords a unique opportunity to examine the impact that shifts in modes of description have on possibilities for action.
Journal Article
Nominalist dispositional essentialism
Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle’s (2009) Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.
Journal Article
How Did Bengal Become a Society?
Starting in the nineteenth century, ‘society’ emerged as a new object of contemplation, a new conception of historicity, and a new framework of norms in Bengal. This article asks what kind of epistemological project this turn to the social represented, and what its emergence suggests about the historical circumstances that underwrote its conditions of possibility. I suggest that, beyond the narrower framework of colonial knowledge, the social emerged as a reflexive inquiry into the ways in which the conditions of collective and individual life were being transformed by practices of interdependence that defied containment to regional geographies.
Journal Article
How to Misspell ‘Paris’
One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.
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