Hume and the nominalist tradition

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (S1):27-44 (2012)
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Abstract

Many of the central theses of Hume's philosophy – his rejection of real relations, universals, abstract objects and necessary causal relations – had precedents in the later medieval nominalist tradition. Hume and his medieval predecessors developed complex semantic theories to show both how ontologies are apt to become inflated and how, if we understand carefully the processes by which meaning is generated, we can achieve greater ontological parsimony. Tracing a trajectory from those medieval traditions to Hume reveals Hume to be more radical, particularly in his rejection of abstraction and abstract ideas. Hume's denial of general, abstract ideas is consistent with his philosophical principles but fails to appreciate the more sophisticated nominalist approaches to abstraction, the result of which is a theoretically impoverished account of our capacity for generalization.

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Citations of this work

Hume on Distinctions of Reason: A Resemblance-First Interpretation.Taro Okamura - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):423-436.

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References found in this work

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40).David Hume - 1739 - Mineola, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner.
A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.
Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay.Francis Herbert Bradley - 1893 - London, England: Oxford University Press.
Causality and Determination.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1993 - In E. Sosa M. Tooley, Causation. pp. 88-104.
Hume.Barry Stroud - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (4):597-601.

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