display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
| 4441 | 'Resemblance Nominalism' won't work, because the theory treats resemblance itself as a universal [Russell] |
| Full Idea: To be a universal, a resemblance must hold between many pairs of white things. We can't say there is a different resemblance between each pair, since the resemblances must resemble each other, so we are forced to admit that resemblance is a universal. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Apparently this objection is much discussed and controversial. It looks like a threat to any theory of universals (involving 'sets', or 'concepts', or 'predicates'). We seem to need 'basic' and 'derivative' universals. Cf Idea 7956. |
| 6440 | Universals can't just be words, because words themselves are universals [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Those who dislike universals have thought that they could be merely words; the trouble with this view is that a word itself is a universal. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: Russell gradually lost his faith in most things, but never in universals. I find it unconvincing that we might dismiss nominalism so easily. I'm not sure why the application of the word 'cat' could not just be conventional. |
| 4429 | If we consider whiteness to be merely a mental 'idea', we rob it of its universality [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If we come to regard an 'idea' like whiteness as an act of thought, then we come to think of whiteness as mental, but in doing so we rob it of its essential quality of universality. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Presumably we need an ontological commitment to the existence of universals, which is very Platonic. Fatherhood might be a better example, since whiteness is a quale. |