Moderate Realism and Its Logic
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D. W. Mertz
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Format: ClothPrice: $65.00
Mertz surveys the history of instance ontology in writings from Plato and Aristotle through Leibniz, followed by modern philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and D. M. Armstrong, among others. He also includes a thorough critique of the recent work of Keith Campbell and other contemporary nominalists. Building on the insights gained through this historical overview, he delves deeper into the logic of instance ontology and uncovers some of its extraordinary problem-solving features: distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate impredicative reasoning; uniformly diagnosing the self-referential paradoxes; being free from the limitation theorems of Gödel and Tarski; providing a basis for the derivation of arithmetic construed intensionally; and formally distinguishing identity and indiscernibility.
"This work is original and scholarly, yet clear and very readable. Mertz's discussion of historical figures and movements is particularly impressive and—rare among contemporary philosophers dealing with the distant past—extremely fair."—Reinhardt Grossman, Indiana University
"Mertz applies the rules and systems of mathematics and logic to instance ontology, the doctrine that asserts the individuality of properties and relations. Tracing its history from Plato and Aristotle to Betrand Russell and D.M Armstrong, he argues for its validity and for its problem-solving capacities, and associates it with a version of the relaist position he calls Moderate Realism."—SciTech Book News
Publication Date: May 29, 1996
