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Hume and the nominalist tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Deborah Brown
Deborah Brown*
Affiliation:
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
*
*Email: deborah.brown@uq.edu.au
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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.

Keywords

Humenominalismmedieval philosophyabstractiongeneralizationrelationsuniversalsideasnamesOckhamHobbesLockeBerkeley
Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 42 , Issue S1: Hume in Alberta: Selected Papers from the 2012 Hume Conference in Calgary , February 2012 , pp. 27 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

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