Problem of universals
"[1] The problem of universals relates to various inquiries closely related to metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, as far back as Plato and Aristotle, in efforts to define the mental connections a human makes when they understand a property such as shape or color to be the same in nonidentical objects.
The problem of universals is considered a central issue in traditional metaphysics and can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle's philosophy,[6] particularly in their attempt to explain the nature and status of forms.
Whereas Plato idealized geometry, Aristotle emphasized nature and related disciplines and therefore much of his thinking concerns living beings and their properties.
The philosopher distinguished highest genera like animal and species like man but he maintained that both are predicated of individual men.
Accordingly, Aristotle was more confident than Plato about coming to know the sensible world; he was a prototypical empiricist and a founder of induction.
Realism's biggest proponents in the Middle Ages, however, came to be Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
[19] The opposing view to realism is one called nominalism, which at its strongest maintains that universals are verbal constructs and that they do not inhere in objects or pre-exist them.
[21] His opposition to universals was not based on his eponymous Razor, but rather he found that regarding them as real was contradictory in some sense.
An early work has Ockham stating that 'no thing outside the soul is universal, either through itself or through anything real or rational added on, no matter how it is considered or understood'.
Nevertheless, his position did shift away from an outright opposition to accommodating them in his later works such as the Summae Logicae (albeit in a modified way that would not classify him as a complete realist).
The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel discussed the relation of universals and particulars throughout his works.
But this togetherness is the opposite of the part.The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton.
We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object".
The 19th-century American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the father of pragmatism, developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley.
Peirce begins with the observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical theories have at first sight an air of paradox and levity very unbecoming to a bishop".
[22] He includes among these paradoxical doctrines Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception".
Peirce also held as a matter of ontology that what he called "thirdness", the more general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities.
Though James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology: From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising.
The moral or political response is given by the conservative philosopher Richard M. Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences (1948), where he describes how the acceptance of "the fateful doctrine of nominalism" was "the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence".
[29] Buddhist ontology regards the world as consisting of momentary particulars and mentally constructed universals.
The apoha theory identifies particulars through double negation, not requiring for a general shared essence between terms.
Taking "beauty" as example, each of these positions will state the following: The school of realism makes the claim that universals are real and that they exist distinctly, apart from the particulars that instantiate them.
Aristotelian realism, on the other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them.
Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct entities in order to account for various phenomena.
The realist may claim that this sentence is only meaningful and expresses a truth because there is an individual, Djivan Gasparyan, who possesses a certain quality: musicianship.
Nominalists often argue this view by claiming that nominalism can account for all the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Occam's razor, and its principle of simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities.
[45] Conceptualists argue that the "concept" of universals are not mere "inventions but are reflections of similarities among particular things themselves.
