An Attempt to an Applied Metaphysics

Abstract

Cluny 1906 [twelfth century]). In this work he criticised a church in Rome that has sunk to become Rome in name only. It is also the last sentence of Umberto Eco's well-known novel The Name of the Rose (1980). The rose in Bernard of Cluny's adage was a core metaphor in the problem of the universals. Dealing with the problem of the relation between universal forms and particular things, its main issue was that although we might have concepts, they do not necessarily refer to reality in its pluralistic nature. Bernard's adage is one of the most elegant summaries of the 'problem of words and things', which in metaphysics has never been truly solved. Looking at the nature of things, philosophers assumed two positions for generations: either it was assumed that forms, in the Platonic sense, were decisive for the emergence of individual things, or it was assumed, from an Aristotelian perspective, that our knowledge is based on individual specific properties or relations (Brougham 1993).The struggle over concepts was a clash between realists, prioritising concepts and forms as attributable to reality, and nominalists, prioritising the unknowable existence of individual things, and regarding concepts as arbitrary and relative to us. Aristotle rejected the idea that names are derived from things: "'Man', and indeed every general predicate, signifies not an individual, but some quality, or quantity or relation, or something of that sort". (Aristotle 1984). Nominalists agreed with Aristotle that Plato's forms do not have an independent existence. Thus names are nothing but our categorisation of individual things in their actualised existence. Nominalism is another term for conceptual formalism: concepts are merely a form of understanding the world, they do not relate to something real in nature. They are part of our way of referring to the world, they do not require being part of that world.The example of the rose is often taken to explain the issue: what's in a name? A rose will smell as sweet, regardless of our labels. The most famous reference to the rose, a covert pun on the dilemma, can be found in Romeo and Juliet. To cite Shakespeare's Juliet in an allusion to the debate, the question is: "Would a rose smell as sweet if called by another name". For the conceptual realist, the rose, the real thing, can be captured by its form, its name, at least, if correctly phrased. For the nominalist, any individual rose would smell sweet apart from the names we attribute to it. In the words of Romeo's later response: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet are obviously well versed in nominalism. But for the realist, it is the form that decides whether the rose smells as sweet as it does. So, if it had been up to those of a Platonic, conceptual realist, persuasion, Romeo and Juliet would have had to remain enemies, since Montegues and Capulets remain defined by their universal form -their belonging to the categories of their respective families.But, speaking from a r...