![]() ![]() I attended that school and that ceremony. Zahawi was educated at three London private schools, one of which he returned to in 2019 as the keynote speaker at the prize-giving ceremony. It is hard to see the relevance of an unprecedented moment of national mourning to the sordid circumstances of his dismissal. ![]() The death of Queen Elizabeth II is reduced to a bullet point providing colour to Zahawi’s CV. The remainder of the six-paragraph-piece is an inventory of imagined achievements. The word “sorry” features only once in the letter, as part of an apology to his family for “the toll this has taken on them”. In this latest iteration of ‘Tory sleaze’, it is Zahawi’s resignation letter rather than the details of his misdeed that best exemplifies the darkness which currently engulfs the heart of British politics. The public has become so desensitised to scandal in recent years that the exact sum of money, the preferred colour of wallpaper, and the number of ‘booze suitcases’ have morphed into objects of satire. Yet the particulars of the scandals which have embroiled the Conservative party as far back as memory stretches no longer feel especially important. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to govern with “integrity and professionalism” left him with no choice but to wield the axe. It emerged last week that the former Conservative Party chairman had failed to disclose HMRC’s punishment of his capital gains tax avoidance on shares worth £27 million in Balshore Investments, an offshore holding company. Used in this sense, particular can mean any concrete (individual) entity, irrespective of whether it is spatial and temporal or not.Nadhim Zahawi’s slippery handling of his tax affairs represents another droplet in an ocean of dishonour. The term particular is also used as a modern equivalent of the Aristotelian notion of individual substance. In formulating a solution to the problem of universals, the term 'particular' can be used to describe the particular instance of redness of a certain apple as opposed to the 'universal' 'redness' (being abstract). This can occur if there is lack of agreement about the best definition of the term. Some terms are used by philosophers with a rough-and-ready idea of their meaning. Particulars include only individuals of a certain kind: as a first approximation individuals with a definite place in space and time, such as persons and material objects or events, or which must be identified through such individuals, like smiles or thoughts. Universals in each moment of time from point of view of an observer is the collection of particulars that participates it (even a void collection). In nominalist view everything is particular. Redness, by contrast, is not a particular, because it is abstract and multiply instantiated (for example a bicycle, an apple, and a given woman's hair can all be red). For example, Socrates is a particular (there's only one Socrates-the-teacher-of-Plato and one cannot make copies of him, e.g., by cloning him, without introducing new, distinct particulars). There are, however, theories of abstract particulars or tropes. Particulars are often seen as concrete, spatiotemporal entities as opposed to abstract entities, such as properties or numbers. Universals concern features that can be exemplified by various different particulars. ![]() In metaphysics, particulars or individuals are usually contrasted with universals. ![]()
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