Wojtek the Late Modern Skeptic

[Lisa & Ian Murray]

>>Nominalism?  Wojtek, you're taking us all the way back to medievalism and
scholasticism!  While nominalism was once an innovation preferable to
Platonic idealism, nominalism can only take you as far as Hobbes, Hume,
etc.  War against abstraction as such gets you stuck in empiricism (which
is a form of idealism in so far as it is only sustained by the
individualism of commodity fetishism).  Further, as Terry Eagleton notes,
you can always find a more radical nominalist than you are, in that your
preferred unit of analysis is, in turn, always subject to a nominalist
criticism of abstraction.

We need a distinction of proper and improper abstractions, which can't be
found in a purely nominalist thinking.

Yoshie
=========

Really Yoshie?  Have all the contingencies and contestabilities of reference
been overcome and the "rigid designator" problem been solved?  Eagleton
unwittingly implies a logical atomism antidote to the open ended iterativity
of lots and lots of referents; a program that failed way back, yet long
after Hobbes, Hume etc.  Indeed, the spectrum of proper/improper
abstractions is itself sorites susceptible and yet another source of
discordian political economy.

Ian