The Denotation of Copredicative Nouns

Copredication is the phenomenon whereby two or more predicates seem to require that their argument denotes different things. The denotation of words that copredicate has been broadly discussed. In this paper, I investigate the metaphysics behind this question. Thus, mereological theories of dot objects claim that these nouns denote complex entities; Asher (Lexical meaning in context, Cambridge University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511793936) thinks that they denote bare particulars; and the Activation Package Theory contends that they stand for multiple denotations. According to the Activation Package Theory, copredicative nouns stand for complex knowledge structures that offer a range of multiple potential denotations. In this paper, I claim that the Activation Package Theory contributes to solve some of the metaphysical questions that arise from copredication.

Particulares nus: uma defesa da teoria do substrato

The present work aims to present the debate of the bare particulars proposal and its critics. We seek here to discuss how the thesis of Bare Particulars is presented today by taking the works of proponents of this thesis. In the following we will present the most current criticisms that are raised upon the thesis and how these criticisms arise based on realism, and specifically from defenders of the bundle theory, that aim to discredit the study of any particular substratum. Finally, we will seek answers to the criticisms and how the defense of the thesis is presented, grounding also from the current literature. Based on the debate between the position of Bare Particulars and the bundle theory, we will seek to defend the theory of the substrate as the simplest way to highlight the identity of objects without incurring in the error of Leibniz’s Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles.

‘What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc.’: Beckett and the Nominalist Ethic of Humility

In the ‘German Letter’ of 1937 Beckett hints that a ‘nominalist irony’ may be a necessary stage in his ultimate aim ‘to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind language’. As Beckett's letter attests, the perennial debate between Nominalism and Realism reached its height in the Scholastic period. Matthew Feldman has shown convincingly that Beckett's own ‘Philosophy Notes’ from the early 1930s onwards revolve specifically around the doctrine of Nominalism. With its internal threats of atheism, pessimism, and nihilism, Nominalism certainly seems like a good fit for Beckett. However, aligning Beckett too closely with Nominalism obscures both the ‘irony’ that his letter shackles to the term, and the fact that Beckett always observed the oxymoronic duties of a ‘systematic sceptic’. Beckett could no more accept the ‘authentic’ particular, than he could the ‘transcendent’ universal. However, far from observing the silence of this mute impasse between the particular and universal, Beckett felt keenly the obligation to express. This essay explores how Beckett transformed his meticulous study of the controversy of universals into an aesthetic strategy: the Nominalist ethic. Examining text and manuscript, this essay argues that Beckett's growing sense of humility, shaped by his reading on Christian mystic Thomas à Kempis' humilitas, encouraged him to embrace Nominalist particulars (the straws, flotsam, births, deaths etc.) as entities of the lowest ontological kind. In the bare particulars of the Nominalist ethic he found a minimally acceptable literary method of going on, without going on. This essay will address the three main ways that the Nominalist ethic manifests in Beckett's writing: in his pronounced linguistic scepticism, in his attack on anthropomorphism, and, finally, in the casual inertness that is a as a condition of his writing.