Papers by Peter van Inwagen - Andrew M. Bailey.
Nominalism is the doctrine that only singular things really exist. Species, sets, common natures, general properties, shared attributes, and so on, are thus taken to have no mind-independent reality of their own. The aim of this paper is to explain how this philosophical notion bears upon the theory of concepts as mental representations.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra is the author of Resemblance Nominalism (4.29 avg rating, 7 ratings, 2 reviews, published 2002), Leibniz's Principle of Identit.

Nominalism, in philosophy, position taken in the dispute over universals—words that can be applied to individual things having something in common—that flourished especially in late medieval times. Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word (e.g., “humanity”) does not imply the existence of a general thing named by it.

Seeking to settle this controversy, essays explore whether apoha offers new and workable solutions to problems in the scientific study of human cognition. They show that the work of generations of Indian philosophers can add much toward the resolution of persistent conundrums in analytic philosophy and cognitive science.

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type.For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green.

One of the most straightforward declarations of nominalism can be found in the New Essays, where numbers and spatial extension are compared: “(I)n conceiving several things at once one conceives something in addition to the number, namely the things numbered; and yet there are not two pluralities, one of them abstract (for the number) and the other concrete (for the things numbered).

The stark alternative is what could be called race nominalism.. The discovery of genes provided some people with a new foundation for race categories—they believed that there would be a genetic basis to categorizations. The idea was that just as a human can be distinguished from a cat by genes.