Is There a Reality in the World?

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R, are you no properties and relations? Do they have existence? A, well, yoman answers, yes, if they exist independent of our minds. And then what about agaist? The obvious next question there is, what about things that are not nouns? Ok. So i'm going to describe myself as having gone through two phases,. ok. For a very long time, up until some point in two thousand 17, i was what you might call a hobseyan nominalist, after thomas hobbs. There is also the way objects are, but those aren't things. Those don't exist. You see what i'm saying? Yes, i do.

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

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