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. ISBN Your tags:. Send-to-Kindle or Email Please login to your account first Need help? Please read our short guide how to send a book to Kindle. Nominalism holds that roundness and squareness are no more than shadows cast by the human activity of classifying together, and applying the same description to, sundry distinct particular objects.
This amounts to the difficulty of believing in universal beings. The objection to Nominalism is its consequence that if there were no human race or other living things , nothing would be like anything else. Williams claims that a property, such as smoothness, is a set of resembling tropes. Members of this set are instances of the property. There are no a priori limits on how many members S should have, or how they should be distributed through space and time.
So in this respect S behaves as a universal must. Moreover, since the members of S are particular smoothnesses, each of them is fully smooth, not merely partly smooth.
This is again a condition which anything proposed as a universal must meet. The closeness of resemblance between the tropes in a set can vary. These variations correspond to the different degrees to which different properties are specific. According to this view, Resemblance is taken as an unanalyzable primitive, and there are no non-particular realities beyond the sets of resembling tropes. So this view holds that there is no entity literally common to the resembling tropes; it is a version of Particularism.
Can we take Resemblance as a primitive? Resemblance between tropes, rather than between concrete particulars, avoids two classic objections to this line. Objection 1. The theory falsely identifies having a heart with having a kidney, and indeed any pair of co-extensive properties. This problem cannot arise where the members of the Resemblance-Class are tropes rather than whole concrete particulars.
Although the animals that have hearts coincide with the animals with kidneys, the instances of having a heart, as abstract particulars, are quite different items from the instances of having a kidney. The Resemblance-Classes for the two properties have no members in common, and there is n o basis for the objectionable identification.
Objection 2. To avoid saying that the members of the ResemblanccClass must all resemble 0 in the same respect, which introduces respects as Realistically conceived uni- versals, we have to require that all the members of the Resemblance-Class must not only resemble 0 but must also resemble one another. But they share no common property. This is the phenomenon of imperfect community. Family resemblance classes are examples.
Not all resemblance classes pick out a genuine universal prop- erty. More precisely, this is the case where the members of the resemblance classes are objects with many different features.
The problem of imperfect community cannot arise where our resemblance sets arc sets of tropes. For tropes, by their very nature and mode of differentiation, can only resemble in one respect. An instance of solidity, unlike a complete mate- rial object, does not resemble a host of different objects in a host of heterogeneous ways.
The difficulty of imperfect community springs from the complexity of con- crete particulars. The simplicity of tropes puts a stop to it. Although the prospects for a resolution of the problem of universals through appeal t o resemblances between tropes are better than those for resemblance be- tween concrete particulars, it is by no means plain that this line succeeds.
The difficulty is that we have an answer to the question: What d o two smooth tiles have in common, in virtue of which they are both smooth? They both contain a trope of smoothness; matching tropes occur in their makeup. But then we at once invite the question: What d o two smooth tropes have in common, in virtue of which they match?
And now we have no answer, or only answers that re- state the situation: These tropes resemble, or are alike, in virtue of their nature, in virtue of what they are. We cannot say it is the wrong sort of thing. Now explanations must stop somewhere. But is this a satisfactory place to stop? I t is through location that tropes get their particu- larity. Further, they are identified, and distinguished from one another, by loca- tion. Further yet, the continuing identity over time of the tropes that can move is connected with a continuous track in space-time.
So the theory seems to be committed ro the thesis that every reality is a spatio-temporal one. But that is too swift, too dismissive. There is, in fact, a less drastic possibility open. That is, that to the extent that there can be non-spatial particulars, to that extent there must be some ana- logue of the locational order of space. To concede that there can be non-spatial particulars to the extent that they belong in an array analogous to space is generous enough toward such dubious items.
We are, however, not yet at the end of the special status of space. The geometric features of things, their form and volume, have a special role. Form and volume are not tropes like any others. Their presence in any particular sum of tropes is not an optional, contingent, matter.
For the color, taste, solid- ity, salinity, and so on, which any thing has are essentially spread out. They exist, if they exist at all, all over a specific area or volume. They cannot be pres- ent except by being present in a formed volume. Tropes are, of their essence, regional. And this carries with it the essential presence of shape and size in any trope occurrence.
The often-noticed fact that shape and size, like Siamese twins, are never found except together, is part of this special status of the geometrical features. Color, solidity, strength are never ,found except as the-color-of-this- region, the-solidity-of-this-region, and so on. So wherever a trope is, there is formed volume. Conversely, shape and size are not genuinely found except in company with other characteristics.
A mere region, a region whose boundaries mark no material distinction whatever, is only artificially a single and distinct being, So the geometric features are doubly special; they are essential to ordinary tropes and in themselves insufficient to count as proper beings. Form and volume are therefore best considered not as tropes in their own right at all. Real tropes are qualities-of-a-formed-volume. The distinctions we can make between color, shape, and size are distinctions in thought to which correspond no distinctions in reality.
A change in the size or shape of an occurrence of redness is not the association of the same red trope with different size and shape tropes, but the occurrence of an at least partly different trope of redness. There is no straightforward correlation between distinct descriptions and distinct tropes. Reduction is the life and soul of any scientific cosmology. Reductions involving elements in familiar human-scale material bodies provide the best of explanations why tropes ordinarily occur in corn- present bundles which cannot be dissociated and whose members resist indepen- dent manipulation.
We all feel in our bones that there is a quite radical distinction to be made between the sorts of changes involved in becoming bald and the sorts involved in becoming a grandfather. The first sort are closer to home. They are intrinsic, whereas the others are in some way derivative, dependent, or secondary. If we content ourselves with an analysis of change in terms of the applicability of descriptions, however, the two sorts of change seem to be on a par.
We can d o justice to the feeling in our bones by distinguishing changes in which different descriptions apply to 0 in virtue of a new trope situation at 0 it- self, from changes in which the new descriptions apply as a consequence of a new trope situation elsewhere.
Trope changes become the metaphysical base from which other sorts of change derive. We can recognize three basic types of change into which tropes enter: 1.
Motions, the shifting about of tropes which retain their identity. When a cricket ball moves from the bat to the boundary, it retains its identity, and the tropes that constitute it retain their identity also.
Many instances of relations, of being so far, in such direction, from such and such, are involved. For all that has been said so far, these are tropes too. Many such enjoy a brief occurrence during any motion. Because there cannot be relations without terms, in a metaphysic that makes first-order tropes the terms of all relations, relational tropes must belong to a second, derivative order. Substitutions, in which one, or more, trope passes away and others take its place.
Burning is a classic case. The object consumed does not retain its identity. Its constituent tropes are no more. In their place are others which formerly had no existence. An object gets harder or softer, warmer or cooler. With such qualities which admit of degree, I think we should allow that the same trope, deter- minable in character though determinate at any given point in time, is involved.
Eu ropeans, languages of incimacy. Synoprically viewed, rhis sequence offers a especially in the Middle Ages and early Modern Age. Cord ial subjectivity is characterized by its declaration that holding onco irs own heart points of a theory of biune intimacy. Download PDF sample. By Keith Campbell Many philosophers have held, explicitly or implicitly, complete survey of the world's materials would come with the "cases" of traits and family members which take place at specific areas and instances.
Efficient Causation: A History Causation is now quite often imagined to contain a succession that instantiates a few law-like regularity. Cosmos and Logos : studies in Greek philosophy The six experiences comprising this quantity care for a few primary matters in early Greek concept: cosmic assessment in Anaximander, the speculation of opposites from the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, suggestion experimentation in Pre-Socratic concept, the origins of Greek Skepticism one of the Sophisists, the prehistory of "Buridan's Ass" hypothesis, and the position of esthesis in Aristotle's conception of technological know-how.
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