rory.gilmore ambient-noise / Kolihovy

Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism

Ray Brassier discusses the work of Wilfrid Sellars regarding the myth of the Given, meaning, nominalism, naturalism, and materialism in this talk. Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities or universals (properties, forms, numbers, species, propositions, etc.). Traditional nominalism proceeded from an empiricist epistemology that challenges the very possibility of metaphysics, whether idealist or materialist. The critique of empiricism is taken to entail the refutation of nominalism. But nominalism contains a valuable insight for materialists: reality does not have propositional form. This is an insight that should be taken up by post-Darwinian materialists, who ought to deny that reality has a conceptual structure. For a consequent materialist, realism about abstract entities is problematic because it re-iterates the theological presumption of a pre-established harmony between the conceptual order and real order. The question is whether materialism can take up this nominalistic insight while jettisoning the empiricist prejudices that tie it to skeptical relativism. For the claim that reality is devoid of propositional form need not require denying that we can use language to capture aspects of reality or that concepts have ontological purchase. This is what Ray Brassier proposes to investigate using the work of Wilfrid Sellars, who managed to combine nominalist semantics, epistemic naturalism, and what Ray calls 'methodological materialism'.

This was from a workshop entitled "War Against the Sun". Credit goes to 'The Matter of Contradiction' for this. For more information, check out the following: http://lamatiere.tumblr.com/