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While it is philosophically contested whether nonlinguistic animals can have conceptual capabilities, it is also philosophically contested whether one can even empirically test for such capabilities. I draw from Sellars’ work on psychological nominalism to develop an empirically tractable means of distinguishing between tasks that require conceptual capabilities and those that do not. Tasks that require conceptual capabilities are those that require awareness of abstract relations, whereas tasks that can be solved merely through Sellarsian picturing do not. I argue that relational matching-to-sample tasks cannot be solved through picturing and therefore require awareness of the abstract relations of same and different. Crows and amazons have both been able to succeed at relational matching-to-sample tasks; therefore, there are at least some nonlinguistic animals that have conceptual capabilities. Finally, I consider the objection that one cannot attribute conceptual capabilities without also attributing knowledge, and Sellarsian conditions for knowledge are beyond the capabilities of any nonlinguistic animal. In response, I argue that Sellarsian conditions for knowledge only require an implicit grasp of the is/looks distinction and empirical work with chimpanzees on their understanding of the appearance/reality distinction demonstrates that they can meet this standard. Therefore, language is not necessary for meeting Sellarsian conditions for knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peirce’s True Gorgias is a brief dialogue from his essay “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic”, published in 1869. The True Gorgias exposes the fallacy of existential import. It has received no sustained attention in the secondary literature, perhaps because the fallacy is now familiar. Peirce’s assessment of the fallacy involved in the reasoning, however, changes between 1865 and 1869, and he only arrives at the contemporary account of existential import in 1880. Moreover, a careful examination of the context in which the True Gorgias appears reveals it provides an argument in support of Peirce’s early Aristotelian realism about universals in contradistinction to non-Aristotelian varieties of realism advocated by W.T. Harris, editor of the journal in which the True Gorgias was published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kim's Ontological Physicalism (OP) presents itself as a naturalistic and monistic metaphysical framework, aligned with the causal closure of the universe and rejecting causally efficacious "exotic" properties. The foundational ontology is, in turn, monistic and materialistic, positing that the universe is composed solely of material particulars: bits of matter. In this work, we identify a notable tension between OP's intended model and the one OP specifies. Initially, we show how the theory inevitably becomes entangled with higher-order entities, not just particulars. Kim introduces the Supervenience Argument (SA) to counteract the possibility of higher-order entities being causally efficacious. While SA proves to be a plausible strategy, it is ultimately inadequate: not only SA is a petitio principii against emergence, but it is also unsound and invalid. Therefore, we propose a formal strategy to restore its ontological effectiveness. Unfortunately, at a closer look, even this strategy falls short as it unwarrantedly assumes the logicality and invariance of those equivalence relations (such as identity, similarity, and congruence) which are crucial for specifying the theory's model as composed of particulars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is dedicated to the comparative analysis of the phenomenon of secularism in the works of the Russian philosopher and theologian Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the English theologian John Milbank. The specifics of the concept of “secularism”, its relation to the tradition of russian religious philosophy are revealed. The multidimensional nature of this relationship is emphasized: Russian thought is described both as a reaction to modern secularism and as its direct continuation. Although at the moment researchers have not reached consensus on determining the nature of the connection between Russian religious philosophy and secularism, the very fact of this connection seems to be beyond doubt. Resorting to Milbank’s theory, the author reveals the internal contradictions of secular reason: on the one hand, it is assumed to be autonomous and having the possibilities of real political action, on the other hand, it is described as constructed and derived. It is noted that this contradiction is due to the genealogy of secularism, which roots lie in the nominalist theology focused on univocal concepts. This aspect plays a crucial role in the construction of the paradigm of “autonomy of political reason”, which determines the course of development of the modern era. Bulgakov’s thought confirms Milbank’s thesis: secularized sciences, such as sociology and economics, always have a hidden theological and metaphysical basis underlying the unity of their construction. Further analysis focuses on the criticism of economic theory carried out by Milbank and Bulgakov: it is revealed that Hegel, being involved in the genealogy of the “autonomy of political reason”, determined the course of development of such modern ideologies as liberalism and Marxism. Based on the results obtained, the author, referring to the theses of Bulgakov and Milbank, suggests the possibility of developing an alternative model of modernity based on analogical, teleological and sophiological approaches.

"The Ontology of Artifacts in the Long Middle Ages: An Introduction" is a document that explores the ontological status of artifacts in medieval philosophy. It discusses the distinction between artifacts and natural things, drawing on the influence of Aristotle's theories. The document also examines the theological dimension of artifacts in the Middle Ages, where they were seen as both separate from nature and as reflecting God's activity. It concludes by mentioning the blurring of the line between art and nature in the 17th century. The text provides an overview of the main ontological problems discussed during this period, focusing on the definition of artifacts and the criteria that must be met for an object to be considered an artifact. The document explores the debates and philosophical perspectives surrounding the ontology of artifacts in the Middle Ages, including the views of realists and nominalists. It also highlights the complex conceptual framework used by medieval thinkers to understand the nature of artifacts, including the distinction between substantial and accidental forms. The special issue includes articles from various perspectives, including Byzantine, medieval, and Renaissance philosophers such as Michael of Ephesus, Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, and René Descartes. [Extracted from the article]

The article examines the Gōngsūn Lóngzǐ, a collection of texts attributed to a fictitious dialectician from the Warring States period, highlighting its intricate argumentation and potential for early Chinese categorical thinking. Topics discussed include the challenges of its textual history, the interpretation of its paradoxical statements through nominalist and realist lenses, and the theoretical framework that underpins its conceptual consistency.

This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first, metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second, metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead lead to either metaethical naturalism or non-naturalism. We can therefore investigate the metaethical question on its own terms only within the framework of trope theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores connections between theories of morality and theories of properties. It argues that (1) moral realism is in tension with predicate, class and mereological nominalism; (2) moral non-naturalism is incompatible with standard versions of resemblance nominalism, immanent realism and trope theory; and (3) the standard semantic arguments for property realism do not support moral realism. I also raise doubts about trope-theoretic explanations of moral supervenience and argue against one version of the principle that we should accept theories that maintain neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complementary and contrasting uses of the terms 'personalized medicine' and 'precision medicine' in denotations of a biomedical approach attentive to individual specificities that harnesses genomics and other data-intensive profiling technologies. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with biomedical experts in the context of the Precision Medicine Initiative in the United States and the 100,000 Genomes project in the United Kingdom, we read definitional reflection and debate through the lens of the sociologies of expectations and novelty. We observed two key aspects in the shift from 'personalized medicine' to 'precision medicine' that has been especially prevalent in the United States. First, the term 'precision medicine' enables its proponents to rhetorically depart from the idea that this approach to medicine can be expected to deliver individually personalized treatments—an expectation that is seen as unrealistic by many. Second, it enables its proponents to assert that personalization, when understood as caring about the patient as an individual person, is not a new approach to medicine but rather something that many medical professionals have always aimed to do (eliding in the process other experiences of US healthcare as, for instance, alienating and discriminatory). We argue that the shift from 'personalized' to 'precision' medicine can be regarded as a manifestation of performative nominalism: an attribution of 'newness' that contributes to performing and propelling innovation, rather than solely reflecting it. In so doing, rhetorical demarcations between personalized and precision medicine emerge as performatively contributing to the production of different biomedical ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a nine step argument for “Connectionist Structuralism” (CS), a physical nominalist position that takes seriously the non-physical phenomenology of abstract objects. CS provides an ontology of sensible properties as a subtype of abstract objects, e.g. “is red” or “is a rectangle”. CS proposes that each sensible property a person draws on corresponds to a subset of their brain structure with functionality isomorphic to a suitable connectionist network. While a common assumption in parts of the artificial intelligence literature, such discussions have not developed formal accounts nor engaged with metaphysical issues that potentially undermine it. Using evidence from cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and evolutionary biology, as well as a fully worked toy example, we describe how CS can support our core cognitive uses of sensible properties and account for our core phenomenal experiences of them. Six phenomenal features are accounted for—feeling intangible, non-located, transparent, and unchanging, along with raw sensation and ante rem phenomenologies—with potential future accounts for further phenomena such as synaesthesia, semantic clarity, and sensory overload. A response is provided to three common objections to nominalist positions that similarly reject intangible, universal benchmarks for sensible properties: referential opacity; identity of indiscernibles; and infinite regression. CS leads to a four-layer hierarchy of similarity for whether your “red” is the same as mine, arguing they are likely non-identical but can be made close enough for practical purposes. Finally, we describe future work to elaborate CS as a metaphysical project and test it through empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the marketing canon, as presently configured, has failed to confer social reality to the acts of its key protagonists – marketers. As an adjunct to both collective and contextually diverse perspectives on marketing, more emphasis on marketer agency is suggested, this in the context of nominally focused anthropological enquiry. It is further argued that the status afforded to consumer behaviour be similarly conferred for marketer behaviour, the latter under-represented within marketing research. Drawing on ontological nominalism, speech act theory and Searle's social constructionism, this article addresses implications for intersubjective meaning within our community and offers provisional thoughts for how this might be structured and improved. It ends with a call to action for both the rehabilitation and expansion of purposeful marketer behaviour study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universals are properties that are shared by multiple objects. In classical South Asia, Brahmanical thinkers from Vyākaraṇa, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, and Mīmāṃsā text traditions were realists about universals, while most Buddhists were nominalists. In this paper, my aim is to reconstruct the early Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika theory of universals, with special emphasis on the arguments of the Nyāya philosopher Uddyotakara (6th century CE) against a Buddhist strand of resemblance nominalism. I show that Uddyotakara's contribution to this debate is twofold. First, he is possibly the first Naiyāyika to adopt a sparse theory of universals, a theory according to which it is necessary to posit only those universals which explain how objects resemble each other in the most fundamental or irreducible respects. On the other hand, he offers a few arguments for realism, which are explicitly motivated by a causal constraint on intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls “internalism” with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstracta exist, it precludes the existence of natural numbers, thus establishing what he calls “restricted nominalism” about natural numbers. We argue that Hofweber’s internalism fails to establish restricted nominalism. Not only is his primary argument for restricted nominalism invalid, the analysis of quantification proposed threatens to collapse internalism into either a traditional form of error theory or realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the abstractionist account of quantity championed by Leibniz, especially in the 1680s. Leibniz introduced the notion of quantity in an indirect way, via an abstraction principle. In the first part of the paper, I identify the context in which this approach arose in light of Leibniz's criticism of his earlier dream of an 'alphabet of human thought'. Recognising the impossibility of such a project led him to realise that, when dealing with terms referring to abstract objects, we should always consider them within the true sentences in which they occur. In the second part, I describe this approach in detail. This allows us to look at some key concepts of Leibniz's theory of quantity. In particular, I raise the problem of the relationship between the two sides of the abstraction principle: how should we think of the relation between the claim that a and b are equal, and the claim that the quantity of a is identical to the quantity of b? I argue that we can find a positive answer to this problem in Leibniz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current form of political correctness has many cultural roots; these explain why its underlying quest for social justice has become a dangerous ideology. This article addresses the political, religious and philosophical roots of this phenomenon. It also sets forth ways of avoiding dangerous extremism while holding onto the demands for justice often associated with political correctness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime matter plays an indispensable role in Aristotle's philosophy, enabling him to avoid the pitfalls of both naïve Platonism and nominalism. Prime matter is best thought of as a kind of infinitely divisible and atomless bare particularity, grounding the distinctness of distinct members of the same species. Such bare particularity is needed in symmetrical situations, like a world consisting of indistinguishable Max Black spheres. Bare particularity is especially important in modern physics, given the homogeneity and isotropy of space. With the importance of fields in classical, relativistic, and quantum physics, we have good reason to prefer something like Aristotle's continuous, infinitely divisible matter over indivisible particles. Mass and energy in relativistic physics also points in the direction of prime matter as the enduring substrate of these quantities. Recent work on Aristotelian interpretations of quantum mechanics, further underscores the contemporary relevance of prime matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Felsefe ve Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (FLSF) is the property of Felsefe ve Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (FLSF) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophical account of experience presented here considers this ‘most deceitful’ (Whitehead 1959: 16) and ‘obscure’ (Gadamer 1998: 346) word as an epistemological category, that is, as integral to our access to truth in both its gnoseological and ontological dimensions. Experience, in this sense, is the practical or speculative knowledge that emerges in time as the fruit of the eventful engagement of all of ourselves with others, the world, and, ultimately, God. While less directly existential than descriptive elucidations of experience that emphasize the affective and sensorial resonance of what the subject lives and undergoes, the philosophical approach grants better grasp of the way experience contributes to the building of different worldviews within which people understand and order human life. The polysemic and ubiquitous character of experience, while forestalling a univocal and all-encompassing narrative, does not prevent us from discovering threads tying various discourses on experience together. It also does not hinder the recognition of the essential elements that constitute every human experience of the engagement of the whole person with all of reality. The entry begins by examining the etymology of experience to show the original richness and permanent complexity of this term. Without the claim of being exhaustive, the following study keeps a speculative emphasis and illustrates some key shifts of meaning that occurred during the historical unfolding of Western culture. It first shows the early Greek understanding of experience as a kind of knowledge and its deepening enabled by the Christian perception of reality as created from nothing by a transcendent God. It then suggests that, in the course of its historical development, the concept of experience undergoes a threefold conceptual reversal. During the long centuries of modernity, experience is no longer seen as a type of knowledge but as its very form. Experience is then conceived mostly as an experiment carried out by the human subject who has the measure of truth within. Finally, more recent attempts conceive experience as the living out of human historical finitude and seek to avoid the interpretative control of subjectivity. Although it does not deal directly with religious or Christian experience, this philosophical elucidation explores the intrinsic relation between reality, God, and our knowledge of both. Furthermore, without absorbing theology into philosophy, it also integrates significant elements of Christian revelation. This philosophical view on experience thus sets the foundation for an exploration of Christian experience that is carried out elsewhere.

Linguistic personology has remained a popular linguistic direction in Russia for more than thirty years. This discipline studies a native speaker or a linguistic personality with their own worldview, mentality, language fluency, linguistic creativity, and ability to understand someone else’s speech. The famous Russian philologist Vladimir V. Kolesov (1934–2019) was a prominent figure in Russian linguistics. However, in his last publication, he criticized both the term linguistic personality and the entire linguistic personology. Although specialists overlooked this criticism, it is important for linguistic personology. This article reveals the philosophical and methodological foundations of V. V. Kolesov’s criticism, as well as interprets the arguments he published in 2009-2021. First, the authors traced the development of anti-personological trends in V. V. Kolesov’s lifetime publications. Second, they identified the prerequisites for the criticism of the theory of linguistic personality. Third, they analyzed the posthumous publication of The Conceptual Field of Russian Consciousness as a synthesis that reinterpreted the previous criticism. The methods of contextual analysis, reconstruction, philological hermeneutics, and comparison made it possible to obtain two theoretical models that explain V. V. Kolesov’s conclusions about linguistic personology. The authors believe that the last thirty years of V. V. Kolesov’s scientific work was a gradual slide towards recognizing linguistic personality as an important tool in describing mentality.

Mathematics, as Eugene Wigner noted, is unreasonably effective in physics. The argument of this paper is that the disproportionate attention that philosophers have paid to discrete structures such as the natural numbers, for which a nominalist construction may be possible, has deprived us of the best argument for Platonism, which lies in continuous structures—in fields and their derived algebras, such as Clifford algebras. The argument that Wigner was making is best made with respect to such structures—in a loose sense, with respect to geometry rather than arithmetic. The purpose of the present paper is to make this connection between mathematical realism and geometrical entities. It thus constitutes an argument against formalism, for which mathematics is merely a game with humanly set rules; and nominalism, in which whatever mathematics is used is eliminable in the final analysis, by often insufficiently specified means. The hope is that light may be cast on the stubborn mysteries of the nature of quantum mechanics and its mathematical formulation, with particular reference to spinor representations—as they have been developed by Andrej Trautman. Thus, according to our argument, quantum mechanics (QM) may appear more natural, as we have better reasons to take spinor structures as irreducibly real, a view consonant with the work of Trautman and Penrose in particular.

The focus of the article is the notion of normativity in logic and politics and their possible intersections. The twentieth-century divide between the analytical and the continental idea of logic is explored, by noting that they both – with significant differences – can be seen as proposing a 'bottom-up normativity', which may have immediate political effects. Logical normativity postulates universality, and a connection between reality and reason able to orient actions universalistically. For a bottom-up conception (as specifically advanced by Deleuze's logic of sense), the universalistic approach does not descend from above on an elusive reality but is a self-organization of multiple processes occurring in a horizon which is typically affected by political facts and choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted for in terms of concrete particulars. In this paper, we consider a number of different kinds of property nominalism and argue that none of them sits well with property dualism. We pay special attention to the question of what it could mean for a property to count as mental given different nominalistic accounts of properties. Our conclusion is that property nominalism and property dualism are not a stable match. This is surprising, since property dualism has usually been understood as a thesis that is neutral about the nature of fundamental ontological categories and the relation between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I study the kind of questions we can ask about the existence of numbers. In addition to asking whether numbers exist, and how, I argue that there is also a third relevant question: why numbers exist. In platonist and nominalist accounts this question may not make sense, but in the psychologist account I develop, it is as well-placed as the other two questions. In fact, there are two such why-questions: the causal why-question asks what causes numbers to exist and the teleological why-question asks for what purpose numbers exist. I argue that in a psychologist constructivist account, in which numbers are understood to exist as referents of a particular type of culturally shared concepts, both why-questions can get plausible answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Destructions of the Modes of Signifying (henceforth: DMS) is an anonymous fourteenth-century polemic against modist speculative grammar (grammatica speculativa). Wielding Ockhamist logic and metaphysics, the DMS repeatedly attacks the very root of modism: the claim that the grammatical features of language are grounded in the metaphysical properties of the world. I call this the Modist Correspondence Thesis (henceforth: MCT). In its most general form, MCT says that every mode of signifying exhibited by an utterance corresponds to a mode of being exhibited by a thing. The Emptiness Argument of the DMS tries to show that MCT fails to accommodate certain special cases, such as privative, fictitious, and divine utterances, like 'blindness' (caecitas), 'chimera' (chimaera), and 'deity' (deitas). The modist Thomas of Erfurt directly addresses the Emptiness Argument, anticipating the anti-modist criticisms present in the DMS. In doing so, he points the way to alternative formulations of MCT that are immune to those criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, we criticize the concept of big history from a constructivist perspective and from the perspective of historical nominalism. We show that if big history were to be mere scientification of Hegel's philosophy of history, it would not be epistemologically productive. But if big history is developed on the ground of the constructivist methodology of historiography, it can be a useful corrective of some of the strands of contemporary historiography which show an excessive tendency of smallview. We base our argument on an analysis of the origins of the problem of totality of complexity of history in the debates between the philosophy of history and the developing historical science in the 19th century. We also draw conclusions from defining the relationship between big history, histoire totale, and grand processual history. Big history concepts always appear to us as culturally coloured. However, the question remains, to what extent they are value neutral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of numerical cognition provides a fairly clear picture of the processes through which we learn basic arithmetical facts. This scientific picture, however, is rarely taken as providing a response to a much‐debated philosophical question, namely, the question of how we obtain number knowledge, since numbers are usually thought to be abstract entities located outside of space and time. In this paper, I take the scientific evidence on how we learn arithmetic as providing a response to the philosophical question of how we obtain number knowledge. I reject the view that numbers are abstract entities located outside of space and time and, alternatively, derive from the scientific evidence a novel account of the nature of numbers. In this account, numbers are reifications of the counting procedure and arithmetic statements are seen as describing the functioning of counting and calculation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of causes in Aquinas’ De principiis naturae 5 establishes how the four classical Aristotelian causes may be divided. The text presents several difficulties, the most important of which are the number of divisions and the not-necessary contemporaneity of the being in potency of a cause and its effect. We aim to resolve these difficulties through a detailed analysis of the Latin text, resulting in a complete commentary on the chapter, which is a secondary contribution. Through this analysis, we resolve the main difficulties. First, by discovering a tacit distinction between the divisions of causes as considered in themselves and as known and verbalized by human beings, the number of the divisions is finally seven (four belonging to the being of causes and three to their knowledge). This distinction has a linguistic sign in the expressions ‘item’ and ‘sciendum est quod’. Secondly, the fact that it is not necessary for a cause and its caused to be simultaneously in potency, can be justified in the case of the singular predication if we consider that an architect, once the house is built, is still in potency of rebuilding that same house, if ever it lost the internal causes of its integrity.

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This article examines Ockham's critique of both the plenitude of papal power and the plenitude of royal power, arguing from the retranslation of theoretical nominalism into political terms. The primacy of the singular represents the irreducible importance of individuals and signals the birth of subjective rights. Here we examine Ockham's theological-political position based on two texts that critics have conceived as intimately linked both in time and in the sentiment that inspired them: Octo quaestiones de potestate papae and Breviloquium. Pointing out the analogies between nominalist and political philosophy, he will argue in favor of what religious life expresses in an exemplary way, at least from the Franciscan perspective: lex evangelica est lex libertatis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that all expressions for abstract objects are meaningless. My argument closely follows David Lewis' argument against the intelligibility of certain theories of possible worlds, but modifies it in order to yield a general conclusion about language pertaining to abstract objects. If my Lewisian argument is sound, not only can we not know that abstract objects exist, we cannot even refer to or think about them. However, while the Lewisian argument strongly motivates nominalism, it also undermines certain nominalist theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There is a longstanding alliance between rationalism and realism concerning universals. Spinoza does not disrupt that alliance. The nature of a Spinozistic substance, after all, is a universal. That is what I argue here. My central point is that a realist conception of universals is a key presumption behind Spinoza’s case for substance monism, a view historically recognized as a natural outgrowth of realism’s toleration of strict identity in diversity. After defending my central point (and, in addition, the secondary point that Spinoza is likely cognizant of this presumption), I respond to two concerns. First, I explain how the nature of a Spinozistic substance is a universal even though there can be only one instance of that nature. Second, I explain how Spinoza’s infamous rejection of universals does not contradict the fact that the nature of a substance is a universal.

The authors propose a new conceptual basis for predicting when and why consumers match others' consumption choices. Specifically, they distinguish between ordinal ("ranked") versus nominal ("unranked") attributes and propose that consumers are more likely to match others on ordinal than on nominal attributes. Eleven studies involving a range of different ways of operationalizing ordinal versus nominal attributes collectively support this hypothesis. The authors' conceptualization helps resolve divergent findings in prior literature and provides guidance to managers on how to leverage information about prior customers' choices and employees' recommendations to shape and predict future customers' choices. Furthermore, the authors find process evidence that this effect is driven in part by consumers' beliefs that a failure to match on ordinal (but not nominal) attributes will lead to social discomfort for one or both parties. Although the primary focus is on food choices, the effects are also demonstrated in other domains, extending the generalizability of the findings and implications for managerial practice and theory. Finally, the conceptual framework offers additional paths for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will look at David Malet Armstrong's conception of the Laws of Nature in light of Iqbal's conception of nature and divine action. For the sake of pragmatic austerity Armstrong rooted his theory in naturalism, physicalism, and an understanding of the world as a "state of affairs." In contrast to Humean empiricists, nominalists, and transcendent realists, Armstrong affirmed the reality of both universals and particulars, which relate to each other in what Mumford calls a form of immanent and a posterior realism. It is out of this formulation that he developed his Laws of Nature as relations between universals. Due to the theoretical problems that typically arise from interactionist views (such as some forms of theism), Armstrong operates from a viewpoint that would question the conceivability of anything acting upon nature from beyond the spatio-temporal realm. However, the conception of God offered by Iqbal, the Ultimate Reality existing as "pure-duration"–holding together "the multiplicity of objects and events," offers a view of nature not as "a mass of pure materiality occupying a void," but as a "structure of events, a systematic mode of behavior" that is "organic" to the Ultimate Self. Nature is an expression of God's character, His habit. And, "nature", or "laws of nature," is our interpretation of the "creative activity" of the Creator. This essay will thus elaborate on the details of Iqbal's conception of God and divine action and the benefits it offers to one seeking to operate within the pragmatic benefits of Armstrong's system while maintaining a decidedly theistic worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]