Blackwell Reference Online

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(1899–1983) American philosopher. Donald Williams was born, and died, in California. A graduate of Occidental College and Harvard, his academic career involved nine years at University of California, Los Angeles in the 1930s, after which he was at Harvard until his retirement in 1967. A realist and naturalist, he defended a classic conception of philosophy's problems, and of the role of reason in pursuit of solutions to them. In ontology , he initiated the programme which gives a central role to tropes , particular instances of qualities and relations, as the fundamental elements of being, from which all else can be constructed. Familiar concrete objects, such as tables, are bundles of tropes united by compresence; familiar properties, such as redness, are collections of tropes related by resemblance ( see trope ). There are no universals and no substrata ( see substratum ). Tropes are the terms of all relations, including causal ones, the objects of all perception, the true subject matter of all judgement. His realism about the natural realm took a distinctive form: the question of the reality of the external world is to be settled in the affirmative inductively, by a posteriori reasoning. Although he tended towards direct realism in the philosophy of perception, with a corresponding realism over secondary qualities, he urged that a representative realism was also a viable ... log in or subscribe to read full text