Author: Jody Azzouni
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: nominalism, case, consequence, existential, deflating
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2006-04-13
List price: $45.00
ISBN-10: 0195308670
ISBN-13: 9780195308679

If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstracta eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept (as an essential part of scientific doctrine) true statements which are about objects that don’t exist in any sense at all.Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitja

Author: Thierry de Duve
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Keywords: readymade, theory, history, literature, painting, passage, nominalism, marcel, duchamp, pictorial
Number of Pages: 246
Published: 2005-10-01
List price: $22.50
ISBN-10: 081664859X
ISBN-13: 9780816648597

Beginning with the instance in 1912 when Marcel Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, "No more painting, get a job," Thierry de Duve reviews in Pictorial Nominalism the implications of the readymade for art and representation. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," de Duve presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction. Differing considerably from such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Burger, de Duve demonstrates that the readymade is the link betwee

Author: D. M. Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Keywords: realism, scientific, universals, amp, volume, nominalism
Number of Pages: 168
Published: 1980-11-28
List price: $26.99
ISBN-10: 0521280338
ISBN-13: 9780521280334

This is a study, in two volumes, of one of the longest-standing philosophical problems: the problem of universals. In volume I David Armstrong surveys and criticizes the main approaches and solutions to the problems that have been canvassed, rejecting the various forms of nominalism and ’Platonic’ realism. In volume II he develops an important theory of his own, an objective theory of universals based not on linguistic conventions, but on the actual and potential findings of natural science. He thus reconciles a realism about qualities and relations with an empiricist epistemology.