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The Nominalist Reading Room

Speusippus (c. 410 - 337 BC)

He wrote extensively on topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of nature, and ethics; but his thoughts have reached us only in tantalizingly incomplete and obscure form. There is some evidence for attributing to him a nominalist, anti-essentialist tendency in his theorizing on semantics, mathematics, and natural kinds. Thus he is reported by Aristotle as denying independent, substantive existence to numbers, and as maintaining that things should be defined not by their own intrinsic characters but rather in terms of their relations of similarity and dissimilarity to other things. If more were known about these ideas, it might illuminate many aspects of Aristotle's theorizing about essence.

J. D. G. E.

Bibliography Speusippus' writings have been collected and discussed by P. Lang, De Speusippi Academici Fragmenta (Bonn, 1911) and more recently by L. Tarán, Speusippus of Athens (Leiden, 1981).

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, © Oxford University Press 1995