Return of the Tropes

Talk about an unlikely "blog meme"! Uriah Kriegel has a post on Desert Landscapes introducing and offering some admiration for metaphysical trope theory (my recent trope post linking to Bill Vallicella's take on this is here).

I find it useful to think through this theory, but believe it finally falls short. Individuals are something more than a bundle of tropes. There needs to be a unification of the individual's constituents. This unifier cannot itself be another trope, but needs to be something ontologically distinct. Uriah Kriegel says he is attracted to this because it is a monistic theory, and monism is more aestetically pleasing than pluralism. I share this attraction, but I've been increasingly of the opinion that you can't easily pack enough features into monism to both make it work and still be worthy of the name.