Abstraction, Relation, and Induction: Three Essays in the History of Thought [Book Review]

The essay on abstraction provides an historical review of the notion of abstraction with an attempt being made to show that there is a basic similarity between the doctrines of Aristotle and Aquinas, on the one hand, and Locke on the other. The conclusion that is then drawn is that the nominalistic critique initiated by Berkeley and refined by Hume in direct answer to the Lockean theory of general ideas is effective against all doctrines of abstraction which hope to end up in a moderate realism. Other concerns are 1) to show the basic affinities between Berkeleyean and Humean nominalism, and late medieval nominalism, in particular that of Ockham, 2) to show that such a nominalism is inadequate and must be replaced by, what has been termed in contemporary analytical circles, psychological nominalism. The essay on relation shows the continuity in the history of the doctrine of relations from the time of Melissus to the Rusellian critique of the substance-accident ontology, critique which Weinberg thinks definitively replaced the unilateral-attribute doctrine of relations. The essay on induction attempts to show how the medieval commentators modified Aristotle's intuitionistic and vestigally [[sic]] Platonic doctrine of induction into a doctrine of covert inference, and anticipated, in part, Bacon's and Mill's theories.—E. A. R.