What’s the consensus on /lit/?I assume a lot of anons have read something by the realist side, but are there nominalism-enjoyers out there? Has anyone read William of Ockham or Roger bacon?
>>24794119>>24794119There's a reason nobody today knows about nominalism, and that's because it doesn't make any fucking senseElaborate on how a particular is "real" as opposed to an abstraction. Beside the fact that even one thing which could be considered a particular will have different properties and realities for any number of different people observing and interacting with it.Abstractions, forms and universals are the things that make cognition possible. They premeditate any and every particular thing.
>>24794178Proof?
>>24794119Fuck nominalism. All my homies hate nominalism. It completely screwed up the course of western history and help layed the metaphysical groundwork which modernist ideology grew out of since it enabled people to deny the existence of objective external reality and enabled the existence of a worldview in which non material non literal universals cannot be actually real. cutting man off from the divine.
>>24794119Nominalism because it's obviously correct.
>>24794178Nominalism lives on in transgenderism
>>24794119Nominalism ruined everything
Belief in universals = globohomo
>>24794178>>24794183Isn't the real issue that nominalism has been replaced with idealism?
>>24794119Hard nominalism is an absolutely deranged position. It has no basis in reality and it's a great litmus test for a midwit or poser.
>>24794654It's not an issue, because idealism is unequivocally right.
>>24794119People here get really angry at nominalism because of culture war reasons. Don’t expect a rational debate on the matter.
>>24794709In all seriousness my point was that Idealism was the replacement for nominalism.
>>24794725cope. even if everything red disappeared including our thoughts then red would still exist as a concept, the world doesn't revolve around humans.
>>24795283>red would still exist as a conceptColour is a really terrible example of a universal for multiple reasons:1. It's a perception2. It has no fixed boundaries3. Wavelengths of light etc
>>24795355It's a good example for those exact reasons. Everything is like that but it's clear and obvious when it comes to light.We subjectively assign a range of wavelengths the label "red" but the range exists.We pick out the parts of reality relevant to the survival the organism, assign them significance and labels. If they weren't real we could choose anything and it would work as well.
>>24795446Sure, the range exists, but 'redness' as a consistent mind-independent entity doesn't exist. It's a name we assign to all the things we perceive as red. It's not an arbitrary label. The things it refers to are real. But I don't think we need to posit the existence of another entity to explain why they all 'participate in redness'
I figured that the problem between realism and nominalism is that nominal terms collapse everything into potential and not actual. realism would say that there's an adequation between the intellect and the signified thing, however incomplete it is, and that this adequation is mediated by the signifier, which itself is a sign that denotes the conceptual content of the signified. point being is that traveling between the nodes of the semiotic triangle all involves actuality: the thing has a sensible species that's perceived by the intellect, abstracted to an intelligible species with a meditating signifier, such that words map onto reality in actuality. once you say that signifiers are only potential, such that words are only the words that they are, and that the reference for signification is free-floating and has no basis in a 'real universal' (because existents have to be physically instantiated and can't be immanently shared features of things), potential and not actual, then you've divorced language from reality. of course, you see this play out where language games become power struggles and the meaning of language is no longer grounded in reality. but reality moves forward, humanity's hubris of thinking it can define and pilpul away external reality is a farce. there's always a correction, which is I guess what that anon up there is bemoaning about 'culture wars'. yeah no shit, once language and meaning aren't concrete, normies would rightly call that dishonesty, and people hate being lied to.
>>24794119The realism vs nominalism debate today omits a very important root aspect of forms and logoi. We act as though the discussion starts with "Yo I think these two bananas display yellow-ness that gotta like... exist separately." But in reality it's the exact other way around, the starting point is "Yo, this mystic has literally seen the eternal forms, what should we consider more real, the principles or their instances?"After realizing this it also becomes apparent that ancient people were much more prone to acknolwedging forms as real, but as mysticism vanished, so did the reason to consider forms/logoi at all and it became just a philosophical hypothesis and word game.>>24794119>Abstractions, forms and universals are the things that make cognition possible.Abstractions are the product of cognition, not its premise. We can make up as many abstractions as we want. Forms and universals are different from abstractions entirely.>Elaborate on how a particular is "real" What we call real is derived of properties of particulars, which you then by reasoning extend to abstractions, forms and whatever other level you conclude.>>24795446>but the range exists.It really doesn't. Light exists. We then reduce it to wavelength, present a spectrum and chunk it up. There is no "red" without humans.
>>24795615>Light exists.No it doesn't, not by that standard. Light is a range of the electromagnetic spectrum. That field includes at least everything massless but maybe everything. We're always picking out relevant parts of reality like with the example of red.
>>24795677>Light is a range of the electromagnetic spectrum.Fair point.>We're always picking out relevant parts of reality like with the example of red.Yes, we are. We. Without us, there might be eternal logoi in the mind of God that make individual types of items and processes radically distinct, but as far as things like "red" or "banana", those are our inventions.
>>24795485>I don't think we need to posit the existence of another entity to explain why they all 'participate in redness'How anything can participate in redness in the first place is not part of our description of any specific red thing. It's outside the model, separate from the concept the word is referencing. In that way it's fundamentally separate even if it's really part of the same thing.>>24795682The banana is radically distinct from the tree, shaped by the tree's purpose and story about the world. The rules the tree was limited by establish a context where the form of the banana emerges whether there's a physical banana or not. So yes the banana exists as an eternal form in the mind of God but so does an infinite number of other forms, we subjectively choose to assign this specific form significance and give it labels we teach to kids.
>>24795696>The banana is radically distinct from the tree>shaped by the tree's purpose and story about the worldIt's part of the tree, as distinct and as related as the leaves. We, for our purposes, find a particular few distinctions more salient than others. But that doens't mean they are to be put objectively into separate brackets or that separate brackets objectively exist at all.>So yes the banana exists as an eternal form in the mind of God>so does an infinite number of other formsI don't know if either of these are true. That you can name something doesn't automatically mean you spotted an eternal form.
>>24794732Idealism is opposed to materialism, not realism.
>>24794501in what way?
>>24795711>That you can name something doesn't automatically mean you spotted an eternal form.It does unless you're naming the same thing again with a different label, an irrelevant, random context is just extremely uninteresting and insignificant to us. The different context the thing derives from makes it distinct and a product of something not contained within our description of things, derived from the same "third realm" that makes us able to come up with descriptions and identify things in the world based on those descriptions in our minds, the "second realm".>>24795711The tree isn't like light or rocks, it's alive. The banana as a distinct thing serves a purpose for the tree in a collaborative story with species that eat it and spread banana trees.
>>24794709This is not a baseless troll. For the idealists nominalism vs realism is a meaningless debate. And this is also the spirit of Aristotle and even Aquinas. “Is it REALLY a maple tree… or an irreducible individual?” Both propositions are true in different ways, deal with it. But ofc this being 4chan we mostly get trads reading Approved Secondary Literature that tells them that admitting the maple tree is a unique individual in its own right leads to troons. I’ve met Milbank in real life, he is very fat and his hands are very soft.
>>24795742>>That you can name something doesn't automatically mean you spotted an eternal form.>It doesThen we're simply not talking about the same thing. I believe in divine logoi, but from the brief research I did it doesn't at all imply that God articulated a separate logos or form for string literals in Python 3.14.0. I understand why someone would think of it this way, since in contemporary philosophy forms really are treated like mere abstractions, but as someone who draws on a living religious tradition, I don't have to do that. Abstractions are an imperfect, shaky way to hypothesize about logoi/forms.>The banana as a distinct thing serves a purpose for the treeAs do the leaves. As do the roots. Each in their own way, but they ultimately form one organism and they're more alike than they are different. To our mammal cognition a yellow banana registers more saliently than a root we've never seen is natural, but does not actually reveal anything about objective forms.
>>24795789So essentially your position is “the world is intelligible because God is an intellect, I call this intelligible aspect of a thing it’s logos.”You’re not even on the threshold of the medieval debate lol
>>24795789The purpose of the roots is not to separate from the tree. The fruit is specifically created to be distinct.Red is significant to us partly because of this same shared story with trees.God created the context which allows python including every possibility we can explore with it. The triangle is more significant and more fundamental due to the context it derives from being close to our most fundamental assumptions. Its significance to us is also defined by God and from our perspective is rooted in an appeal to power so its not arbitrary in that sense.
