Peter Simons

My subject is the arguments brought by Ramsey in his paper “ Universals ” ’ against the generally held distinction between particulars and universals. This paper is provocative, suggestive, and radical, and it is humbling to reflect that its author was just 22 years old when it was published in Mind. As so often with Ramsey, the paper is superficially very easy to follow and hardly requires any introduction other than the imperative, “Read it through”, but underneath the surface are many assumptions which make the paper difficult to interpret, and its argument structure is quite tortuous. Whereas the debate between nominalists and realists has been about whether there are just particulars or whether there are universals as well, Ramsey wants to step back behind the debate and question the basis on which it is made. His aims are primarily destructive: he wants to argue that there is no good reason to believe there is such a distinction. He does not offer much in the way of a positive theory of his own to replace those he considers he is demolishing. It is characteristic of Ramsey’s Cambridge perspective that he puts the debate in terms of the way such questions were considered in Cambridge in his day. His terms of comparison hardly extend beyond Cambridge, which in those days was quite a reasonable stance, since Cambridge provided sufficiently many great philosophers with differing theories for extramural excursions to be an unnecessary luxury. Ramsey accordingly focusses on the supposedly different roles of words for particulars and words for universals in atomic propositions, on the assumption that there will be some fairly straightforward kind of isomorphism between at least atomic propositions and the atomic facts to which they correspond if true. The alert reader will notice that he frequently switches between calling Socrates and ‘Socrates’ the subject of the same proposition

This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter theory embodies on its own an account of the nature of identity through time of things that are in time but not extended in time. The question is whether this view is compatible with the trope bundle account of concrete particulars, and, assuming it is (both theories being separately attractive) whether bringing them together entails any modifications (other than complexity) to either theory. After examining likely metaphysical difficulties the tentative conclusion is that the attractiveness of the trope bundle theory persists despite the marriage, but that the mental picture of what tropes and trope bundles are must be overhauled.

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien.

This is a broad survey of the chronology of the rift between continental and analytic philosophy, starting in 1899. Whereas at that time there was no discernible divide, as the twentieth century progresses we can see a gradual parting of the ways in which philosophy was done, culminating in a period of maximum separation in 1945-68, followed by some convergence. There is one substantial historical thesis proposed, and facts are adduced from the chronology to back it up: that the divide was never absolute, never purely geographical, and above all that it was not inevitable, but was largely the product of accidental historical circumstances, of which the most crucial was the flourishing of totalitarianism in Europe and the disruption caused by two world wars.

Dans cet article, l’auteur présente la théorie bolzanienne du nombre. Il établit, sur la base d’une comparaison avec Frege, que la conception bolzanienne rencontre toutes les exigences d’une telle théorie tout en présentant plusieurs traits originaux, comme par exemple le fait qu’elle s’articule sur la base d’une théorie des « collections » , qui lui confèrent un intérêt philosophique certain. Tout en indiquant au passage un problème inhérent à la notion bolzanienne de Reihe, l’auteur présente la conception bolzanienne des nombres naturels, reconstruit sa théorie des nombres abstraits et montre comment Bolzano est en mesure d’établir le lien entre ces derniers et leur application aux ensembles concrets d’objets.In this article, the author exposes Bolzano’s theory of numbers. He shows, on the basis of a comparison with Frege, that Bolzano’s conception not only meets all the requisites of such a theory but also exhibits original features, such as for instance the fact that it is grounded in a theory of “collections” , which impart it with undeniable philosophical interest. After indicating one problem relating to the Bolzanian notion of a Reihe, the author presents Bolzano’s conception of natural numbers, reconstructs his theory of abstract numbers and expounds the connection between the latter and their application to concrete sets of things

λ-calculi are of interest to logicians and computer scientists but have largely escaped philosophical commentary, perhaps because they appear narrowly technical or uncontroversial or both. I argue that even within logic λ-expressions need to be understood correctly, as functors signifying functions in intension within a categorical or typed language. λ-expressions are not names but pure viable binders generating functors, and as such they are of use in giving explicit definitions. But λ is applicable outside logic and computer science, anywhere where the notions of complex whole, substitution, abstraction and structure make sense. To illustrate this, two domains are considered. One is somewhat frivolous: the study of flags; the other is very serious: manufacturing engineering. In each case we can employ λ-abstraction to describe substitutions within a structure, and in the latter case there is even a practical need for such a notation.

It is argued that the source of complexity in language is twofold: repetition, and syntactic embedding. The former enables us to return again and again to the same subject across many sentences, and to maintain the coherence of an argument. The latter is governed by two forms of complexification: the functor-argument structure of all languages and the operator-bound-variable mechanism of familiar formal languages. The former is most transparently represented by categorial grammar, and an extension of this can adequately describe the syntax of variable binders. Both developments have roots within the work of the Lvov-Warsaw School.

In a recent article, Herbert Hochberg portrays my ontological position, that of a trope nominalist who is sceptical about relational tropes, as deviating into idealism. Since there are few philosophical views I find more repugnant than idealism, I must either resist the accusation or recant. I choose to resist, by showing how relational tropes are not needed as truth-makers for a wide range of truths, and raising the real possibility that they may not be needed at all, without lapsing into either monism or idealism

The debate between 3- and 4-dimensionalists is one of the most lively and pervasive in current metaphysics. At stake is a glittering prize: the correct metaphysical analysis of material things and other objects commonly thought to persist in time by enduring. Since we count ourselves among such objects the outcome of the debate is of more than merely academic interest to us. Obviously the ramifications of the debate, even of the points raised by Kit Fine, go far beyond what I can discuss here, so I shall simply select some salient issues and comment on them from my own somewhat heterodox point of view.

I argue that the assumptions that physically basic things are either mereologically atomic, or that they are continuous and there are no atoms, both face difficult conceptual problems. Both views tend to presuppose a largely unquestioned assumption, that things have parts corresponding to the geometric parts of the regions they occupy. To avoid these problems I propose a third view, that physically simple things occupy a finite volume without themselves having parts. This view is examined enough to tease out some of its consequences and show that it withstands the obvious questions it faces. I conclude by mentioning some precedents for this view in Democritus, Kant, and Whitehead, with close variants in Boscovich, Harré, and Markosian.