Nominalism

By Loux, Michael J.

‘Nominalism’ refers to a reductionist approach to problems about the existence and nature of abstract entities; it thus stands opposed to Platonism and realism. Whereas the Platonist defends ...

Nominalism

By Guigon, Ghislain

‘Nominalism’ refers to a family of views about what there is. The objects we are familiar with (e.g. hands, laptops, cookies, and trees) can be characterized as concrete ...

Buddhist doctrine of nominalism

see Nominalism, Buddhist doctrine of.

Nominalism, Buddhist doctrine of

By Dunne, John

Buddhist nominalism refers to the nominalist ontology and semantics developed especially by the Indian Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Elaborating on the arguments of their Buddhist predecessor Vasubandhu, ...

Poland, philosophy in

By Czerkawski, Jan; Stepien, Antoni B.; Wielgus, Stanislaw

Philosophy in Poland has developed largely along the same lines as its Western European counterpart. Yet it also has many aspects which are peculiar to itself. Historically, the ...

Biel, Gabriel (before 1425–95)

By Farthing, John L.

Biel was the last great systematizer of scholastic theology and philosophy. Not noted for originality, he sought to produce a synthesis of the work of his predecessors. His ...

Locke, John (1632–1704)

John Locke was the leading English philosopher of the late seventeenth century. His two major works, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of ...

Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200)

By Sharples, R.W.

The Peripatetic philosopher Alexander was known to posterity as the commentator on Aristotle, until Averroes took over this title. His commentaries eclipsed most of those of his ...

Universals

By Bigelow, John C.

In metaphysics, the term ‘universals’ is applied to things of two sorts: properties (such as redness or roundness), and relations (such as kinship relations like sisterhood, or the ...

Language, medieval theories of

By Ebbesen, Sten

A great deal of theorizing about language took place in western Europe between 1100 and 1400. The usual social context of this theorizing was the teaching of grammar, ...

Universals

By Cowling, Sam

Universals such as humanity, redness, and mass are general entities instantiated by particulars. For example, Trudeau and Obama are particulars that instantiate the universal humanity ...

Buridan, John (c.1300–after 1358)

By Zupko, Jack

Unlike most other important philosophers of the scholastic period, John Buridan never entered the theology faculty but spent his entire career as an arts master at the University ...

Chinese philosophy

By Hall, David L.; Ames, Roger T.

Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader ...

Quine, Willard Van Orman (1908–2000)

By Orenstein, Alex

Quine is the foremost representative of naturalism in the second half of the twentieth century. His naturalism consists of an insistence upon a close connection or alliance between ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

By Skorupski, John

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. His ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Wodeham, Adam (c.1298–1358)

By Wood, Rega

An English Franciscan theologian, Wodeham was preoccupied with logical and semantic questions. He lectured for about a decade on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, first at London, then at Norwich ...

Natural kinds

By Daly, Chris

Objects belonging to a natural kind form a group of objects which have some theoretically important property in common. For example, rabbits form a natural kind, all samples ...

Natural kinds

Objects belonging to a natural kind form a group of objects which have some theoretically important property in common. For example, rabbits form a natural kind, all samples ...

Naturalized philosophy of mathematics

By Paseau, Alexander

There are three types of naturalism in the philosophy of mathematics: metaphysical, epistemological and methodological. Metaphysical naturalists maintain that all entities are natural. One reading of this claim ...

Byzantine philosophy

By Benakis, Phil Linos

In Byzantium from the ninth century through to the fifteenth century, philosophy as a discipline remained the science of fundamental truths concerning human beings and the world. Philosophy, ...

Fictionalism in the philosophy of mathematics

By Colyvan, Mark

Fictionalism in the philosophy of mathematics is the view that mathematical statements, such as ‘8+5=13’ and ‘∏ is irrational’, are to be interpreted at face value and, thus ...

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

By Irwin, T.H.

Aristotle of Stagira is one of the two most important philosophers of the ancient world, and one of the four or five most important of any time or ...

Patañjali (c. 2nd century BC)

By Bronkhorst, Johannes

The grammarian Patañjali lived in the second century bc, before the appearance of the classical systems of Indian philosophy. The aspects of his thought that we would ...