On Dec 14, 2011, at 3:20 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
Sorry. I should have changed the automated "wrote" to "cited."
> OK. I agree. But I didn't write the passage you quote.
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> On Dec 14, 2011, at 2:05 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>> The main point of the nominalist position pertains to the
>> relationship
>> between ideas (universals to be more precise) and reality these ideas
>> represent. It maintains that ideas are a product of human
>> consciousness and do not exist in reality. It follows that they
>> cannot cause anything in the realm of reality. In other words,
>> altering depictions of reality (ideas) do not produce any changes in
>> the reality itself. The realist position, by contrast, maintains
>> that
>> ideas have real existence - they are more real than empirical
>> experiences of reality.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
>
> All this is frightfully muddled, where not downright wrong. It
> postulates three "realms:" of "universals;" of "reality;" and of
> "human consciousness" without suggesting anything about the
> relationship among those realms. It then asserts that (according to
> nominalism) "universals cannot cause anything in the realm of
> reality." But who can doubt that among the infinite number of factors
> causing changes in the realm of reality is to be counted *human
> action*? And what is human action if not the practical use of
> universal conceptions in order to act on reality (if I did not
> associate the universal "sweetness" with the universal "honey" I would
> never sweeten my tea by adding honey)? As this homely example proves,
> the changed reality (sweetened tea) results from (includes among the
> causal factors determining it) the universals sweetness and honey. And
> to say (leaving aside the pleonasm "empirical experiences") that
> "Realism maintains that universals have real existence - they are more
> real than empirical experiences of reality" is to postulate a single
> substance of "reality" with certain things (universals, particulars)
> possessing more or less of it than others. But, as Realists from Plato
> to Hegel to Marx to Whitehead have tirelessly pointed out, universals
> and particulars differ not in degree of reality but in the essential
> character of their respective realities: universals are temporally
> invariant (honey has always involved sweetness ever since the first
> bee took pollen from the first flower) while material particulars only
> exist in time (their existence is limited to a defined place in a
> system of four coordinate dimensions, one of which is time).
>
> All this was so obvious as to be taken for granted by Plato, but was
> later so totally obscured by that form of nominalism known as
> Materialism that Marx had to write in a thesis on Feuerbach: "The
> question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking
> is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must
> prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, of his thinking, in
> practice."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even
> downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
>
>
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