Moderate Realism and Its Logic / Ramsay MacMullen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacMullen, Ramsay, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Realism.

Individuation (Philosophy).

Logic, Symbolic and mathematical.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 310 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [1996]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Instance ontology, or particularism-the doctrine that asserts the individuality of properties and relations-has been a persistent topic in Western philosophy, discussed in works by Plato and Aristotle, by Muslim and Christian scholastics, and by philosophers of both realist and nominalist positions. This book by D. W. Mertz is the first sustained analysis that applies the rules and systems of mathematics and logic to instance ontology in order to argue for its validity and for its problem-solving capacities and to associate it with a version of the realist position that Mertz calls "moderate realism."Mertz surveys the history of instance ontology in writings from Plato and Aristotle through Leibniz, followed by modern philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and D. M. Armstrong, among others. He also includes a thorough critique of the recent work of Keith Campbell and other contemporary nominalists. Building on the insights gained through this historical overview, he delves deeper into the logic of instance ontology and uncovers some of its extraordinary problem-solving features: distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate impredicative reasoning; uniformly diagnosing the self-referential paradoxes; being free from the limitation theorems of Gödel and Tarski; providing a basis for the derivation of arithmetic construed intensionally; and formally distinguishing identity and indiscernibility.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Chapter One. Instance Ontology

Chapter Two. Traditional versus Instance Ontology

Chapter Three. Plato and Aristotle on Instance Ontology

Chapter Four. Some Medieval and Early Modern Views

Chapter Five. Some Modern Views of Unit Attributes

Chapter Six. The Irreducibility of Relations

Chapter Seven. Specious Arguments against Relation Instances

Chapter Eight. Bradley's Regress and Further Arguments for Relation Instances

Chapter Nine. The Logic of Particularism and Some Applications

Chapter Ten. Instance Ontology and Logic Applied to the Foundations of Arithmetic and the Theory of Identity

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780300146202

0300146205

OCLC:

861792698