1 Hobbes, Universal Names, and Nominalism

Thomas Hobbes was, rather famously, a nominalist. The core of that nominalism is the belief that the only universal things are universal names: there are no universal objects, or universal ideas. Hobbes’s nominalism prompted notable objections from his contemporaries. Leibniz referred to Hobbes as an ultranominalist, someone who went well beyond the position of previous nominalists, and he and other contemporaries objected that Hobbes’s nominalist views would have the consequence that people could not say the same thing in different languages. Hobbes’s nominalism is prominent enough that it is regularly mentioned in accounts of his philosophy, but there is relatively little extended discussion of this topic in the secondary literature.1 However, despite the brevity of Hobbes’s treatments of the issue, and the seeming clarity of his central view that universal names are the only universals, a variety of questions do arise. This paper has three main sections. The first and longest looks at what Hobbes’s views about universal names were, how they evolved over time, and how Hobbes argued for them. The remainder of the paper investigates Hobbes’s view further by looking at two objections to it, one from the seventeenth century and the other from the twentieth. Thus the second section examines a criticism made by several of Hobbes’s contemporaries, that Hobbes’s view could not account for people saying the same thing in different languages. Then the third section looks at a more recently popular criticism of Hobbes, that hi