Abstract particulars

Keith Campbell0631147071, 9780631147077

Many philosophers have held, explicitly or implicitly, that a comprehensive survey of the world’s constituents would include the “cases” of qualities and relations which occur at particular places and times. It is not so common to affirm that such cases are themselves particulars in their own right, rather than deriving their particularity from their association with a substance. In this study the author contends that properties can be particulars and proposes a first philosophy which recognizes such particular properties, or tropes, as the sole fundamental category. He offers a new version of the Resemblance resolution of the Problems of the Universals, and also argues for theses about relations (Foundationism) and the basic physical properties (field theory) which are congenial to a trope philosophy, but are in large measure independent of it, having merits irrespective of the truth about properties in general. The final chapter points to the strengths of a trope analysis for the philosophy of the mind and of social phenpmena.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 1
Preface……Page 4
1.1 Ontological Assays……Page 6
1.2 Tropes……Page 7
1.3 The Classic ‘Aristotelian’ Two-category Ontology……Page 9
1.4 The Embarrassments of this Ontology……Page 11
1.5 Earlier One-category Assays……Page 22
1.6 Tropes and the Assay of Common Situations……Page 25
1.7 Other Structures……Page 27
1.8 A Sparse Theory of Tropes……Page 29
2.1 Getting the Problem in Focus……Page 32
2.2 The Issues Distinguished……Page 34
2.3 Resemblance and the Second Issue……Page 35
2.4 Objections to a Resemblance Theory……Page 37
2.5 The Analysis of Predication……Page 45
2.6 Williams’ Painless Realism……Page 48
2.7 Structural Universals……Page 50
3.1 The Problem over Spatio-temporality……Page 57
3.2 Extended Concepts of Dimensionality……Page 58
3.3 Pure or Bare Particularity……Page 60
3.4 The Parity of Tropes with Substances……Page 61
3.5 Hochberg’s Arguments……Page 62
3.6 The Moreland Critique……Page 69
3.7 Simplicity and Individuation……Page 72
3.8 The ‘Swapped Tropes’ Objection……Page 75
3.9 Exact Similarity……Page 76
3.10 Abstract Reference……Page 77
3.11 Laws of Nature and Induction……Page 78
4.1 Natural Kinds, Genus and Species……Page 84
4.2 Determinate and Determinable……Page 86
4.3 Quantities……Page 88
4.4 Units……Page 90
4.5 Sets, Numbers and Hyper-abstractions……Page 91
4.6 Geometry……Page 94
4.7 Possibility……Page 96
5.2 Why Frown on Relations?……Page 99
5.3 Relational Truths are not Eliminable……Page 101
5.5 Russell’s Arguments in Support of Relations……Page 103
5.6 Relations as Unilateral or Bilateral……Page 106
5.7 Reinhardt Grossmann’s Arguments against Foundationism……Page 108
5.8 External and Internal Relations……Page 112
5.9 Causation……Page 115
5.10 Particular Cases and Generalizations……Page 117
5.11 Humean Groundlessness in Causation……Page 118
5.12 Causal Powers and the Virtus Dormitiva……Page 119
5.13 Powers and Causal Contingency……Page 121
5.14 Powers, Bases and Supervenience……Page 122
5.15 Abstract Particulars as Causal Terms……Page 124
5.16 The Monism Issue……Page 126
5.17 Position and the Nature of Space-Time……Page 128
5.18 Compresence……Page 132
6.1 Identity in Ontology……Page 136
6.2 Manifest Tropes and the Part/Whole Problem……Page 137
6.3 Spectra and the Boundary Problem……Page 139
6.4 Temporal Parts……Page 141
6.5 Change……Page 142
6.6 Russellian Events; a Trope Atomism……Page 143
6.7 Resisting the Russellian Temptation……Page 144
6.8 The Field Approach to these Problems……Page 146
6.9 Particles……Page 148
6.10 A Judicious Instrumentalism……Page 150
6.11 Quasi-tropes: Recovering the Manifest World……Page 152
7.1 The Philosophy of Mind……Page 157
7.2 Materialism with Tropes……Page 158
7.3 Trope Dualism……Page 159
7.4 The Self……Page 163
7.5 The Social World……Page 165
7.6 Against Social Substances……Page 166
7.7 Social Facts and Aspects of Life……Page 167
7.8 Society and Emergence……Page 169
7.9 The Causal Issue……Page 172
Notes……Page 175
References……Page 181
Index……Page 185