A Constructive Approach to “Universals”
نویسندگان
چکیده
But it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with: every bird and beast men saw; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding. During the Middle Ages, much of the debate about universals concerned the question whether or not they could be considered to " exist ". According to their point of view, the discussants could be separated at least roughly into four schools. 1. Platonic Realists, who characterized their position by the slogan universalia ante res; they believed that we have general concepts before we experience things. 2. Aristotelian Realists , whose slogan was universalia in rebus sunt, because they considered them inseparably inherent in things. 3. Nominalists , who maintained that words are the only universals, because they can be applied to a variety of things. 4. Conceptualists , for whom universals arose post res, i.e., after the experience of things because they were generated by abstractive thinking from particulars. All four schools have their problems. According to 1, all the universals that cover inventions and newfangled things, such as windmills, chastity belts, Highways, quarks, and credit cards, would have to have " existed " at the very beginning. Of course, if you believe with Plato that God supplies every newborn with the full complement of necessary ideas, there is no problem, because God, being omniscient, knows all human inventions before they are made. But for modern thinkers this is not a congenial model.
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