Thus, ironically, because of its
nominalist disposition the SJM actually cannot hope to give us social justice, including in economics.
This gives us three different kinds of
nominalist objects: abstract particular, concrete particulars, and concrete universals.
The
nominalist view of the world combined with the idea that all our knowledge comes only from our senses and that our minds at birth were nothing but a blank slate lead to empiricism.
Without the requisite semantic grounds the regress argument seems to lose its force against the
nominalist. For if words have meaning by ways other than standing for an object, then Russell's requirement that the
nominalist has to give an explanation of 'resemblance' seems to beg the question against the
nominalist.
Of course, this means engaging with that arch
nominalist finger-poker Friedrich Nietzsche and all his marching armies of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms.
Are general or universal categories in some sense real, as the realists claim in the wake of Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, or are they, as the
nominalists insist, concepts which we ourselves foist upon a world in which whatever is real is irreducibly particular?
Thus, after a brief overview of the Court's reasoning (II), I shall try to assess the decision in light of some reflections on
nominalist philosophy (III).
The Thomists accentuated God's reason, while the
Nominalists accentuated God's will.
Most readers, of course, will be familiar with other versions of Borges's summary of the dispute between realists and
nominalists, as depicted in canonical texts from History of Eternity all the way to Other Inquisitions.
For some
nominalists, that might suffice to show that whales actually are fish.
There has been a widespread view that species are only arbitrary artifacts of the human mind, as some
nominalists, in particular, have claimed." (24) In The Origin of Species Darwin states "...
