Hume and the nominalist tradition

Abstract

Many of the central theses of Hume's philosophy – his rejection of real relations, universals, abstract objects and necessary causal relations – had precedents in the later medieval nominalist tradition. Hume and his medieval predecessors developed complex semantic theories to show both how ontologies are apt to become inflated and how, if we understand carefully the processes by which meaning is generated, we can achieve greater ontological parsimony. Tracing a trajectory from those medieval traditions to Hume reveals Hume to be more radical, particularly in his rejection of abstraction and abstract ideas. Hume's denial of general, abstract ideas is consistent with his philosophical principles but fails to appreciate the more sophisticated nominalist approaches to abstraction, the result of which is a theoretically impoverished account of our capacity for generalization.

Keywords::

• Hume
• nominalism
• medieval philosophy
• abstraction
• generalization
• relations
• universals
• ideas
• names
• Ockham
• Hobbes
• Locke
• Berkeley

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to the audience at the Hume Society Meetings in Calgary, 2012, to Jennifer Welchman and Amy Schmitter for tireless editorial and philosophical advice, to two anonymous referees for their insightful comments, to Mark Hooper for stimulating conversations about Hume on error and to Jack MacIntosh and Calvin Normore for conversations both entertaining and illuminating about medieval and early modern nominalism.

Notes

^1. Rodis-Lewis (1971, 43) notes the tolerance towards nominalism at La Flèche despite the fact that nominalist texts were censured. Hume spent most of his time in France between 1734 and 1737 at La Flèche.

^2. Cf.: Weinberg (1964–65) and Nadler (1996) on the continuities between Hume and medieval and early modern occasionalists, notably Al-Ghazali (1997) and Malebranche (see 1997, 446–52). Nicolas of Autrecourt also advanced Humean-sounding arguments (see Copleston 1973–74). Hume, however, rejects the distinction between real and occasional causes (T 1.3.14.32; SBN 170–1).

^3. See the twelfth-century historian, Otto of Freising and Rahewin (1912), book I.

^4. For the connection in Abelard's thinking between statuses and mereology, see Normore (1987).

^5. For an argument that Ockham achieves his goal of parsimony, see Adams (1987, 287–313), and for a contrary view, Pannacio (1990).

^6. Meinong (1966, 135–139) argues that Hume and Berkeley differ over whether to admit general ideas or not. Berkeley (1948–57, 2: 121–45) allows non-abstract general ideas but lacks a clear account of how one idea can function as the sign of many particular ideas. For a contrary reading emphasizing the similarities between Hume and Berkeley, see Bradshaw (1988) and Baxter (1997). I tend to agree with Meinong that Berkeley's account of general ideas is underdeveloped and one Hume cannot share given his commitment to the copy principle.

^7. On Hume's account of general terms, see Tienson (1984).

^8. Many early modern philosophers took the existence of general ideas that can be predicated of infinitely many things to pose a dilemma: either we account for the signification of general ideas by supposing that they represent to the mind an infinite number of things, which is absurd for any finite mind, or by supposing that general ideas possess no determinate quality or quantity at all, which runs into all the problems of abstract ideas. See, for example, Malebranche (1997, 429–30, vol. I). Hume's rejection of general ideas in favour of customs associating general terms with particular exemplar ideas avoids this dilemma.

^9. A related problem suggests itself. Can a Humean account for the difference between a proper name used multiple times and a genuinely common name when all it means to be a common name on his picture is that the individuals resemble each other in some respect and are all called by the same name? All the Bob Smiths we can think about do resemble one other in at least one respect – they are all called “Bob Smith”. I take it though that this should not suffice to make “Bob Smith” a common name. But on Hume's account, why not?

^10. See Brown (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Brown

Deborah Brown is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Queensland. She has written on Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes and Hume. Her 2006 book, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, was published by Cambridge University Press.