Metaphysics
Never mix up the horizontal with the vertical.
The vertical one is subsumption. A kind under a genus. Moving from the particular to the universal or to higher levels of universality. The other direction is property ascription, which is not subsumption. Modern logic fails often to distinguish subsumption and attribution.
Aristotle develops this into 10 categories by studying the movement between the 4 possibilities, or modes of ascription/being.
The term property is used in a loose sense in the professor’s square. For example being at a certain time and place is not a property in the strict sense, because it does not belong to the property of the substance, but is purely accidental.
Quantities and qualities are slightly less accidental, but they can clearly change too. These things change gradually in an accidental manner.
This is why the scholastics did not call them properties but accidents.
The claim is that ultimately all these accidents are quite different and they follow different logics, have different structures – which is in part already explored by aristotle. Like saying that qualities come in polar oppositions.
Quantities have no opposites.
Against the idea that everything that exists can fall under a highest idea, Aristotle says no, existence is not a genus.
For Aquinas Aristotelian philosophy is a self-contaiend whole which does not need to be changed. Aquinas makes some changes like the genera being ideas in God’s mind. These are things which are coherent to Aristotle without altering the content.
In the Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas conceptualises the idea tradition as Plato being wrong about everything and Aristotle being right about everything.
There is a famous medieval controversy known as the battle of universals.
Universal realism was the dominant one.
Hegelians usually call it objective idealism. Ultimately we speak of universals as ideas and we say they exist objectively, that is mind independently. Realism by some and idealism by others. – can also be called platonism.
Plato critiques his own work, like the doctrine of the ideas in the Parmenides.
An offspring and radically new is neoplatonism, which is a kind of mix between aristotle and plato, and that the problems are overcome by having a unified genera of being, and higher on top is the ideas – and at the top is the one. Plato often argues for the Good, but even that has its opposite in the bad, and so there must be something higher, that is a One.
Ultimately universals are beings in their own right. There are universals that exist even if they are not insantiated. So-called pure universals. Ultimately to get fullblown platonism you have to say they occupy a more superior kind of ontology to particulars.
Philosophers who are inclined in this direction are often mathematicians. Mathematics has always been regarded as a strong argument in favour of platonism because they seem mind-independent and eternal.
Some Marxist philosophers of mathematics may argue that mathematics is made up in accordance with an economical need.
Creation in Augustine: everything that exists belongs to a certain order and measure, and everything is somehow determinate. Some of these things that exist are somehow in accordance with mathematical properties. For him this is an argument that the great mastermathematician God exists. The fact that everything is mathematically determined shows the wisdom and the skill of the maker.
<3 phoenix
Determining things means to classify them and determine them to the conceptual order under which they fall. Ultimately universals are there as instruments of thinking. Platonists think that these thoughts must also be true, so they must correspond to a real thing. That we refer to the human kind shows that these thoughts either can be true or false; the kind in and of itself cannot be reduced to its members.
Uninstantiated universals?
Some platonists will bite the bullet and say it’s okay, even if it doesn’t have actuality. How will we then distinguish between genuine universals and fictional entities? We can’t.
Aristotle lists about 50 problems of Platonism. This is one of them.
Another one is the notion of participation. Everything exists insofar as it participates in multiple geni, and ultimately of the highest ideas. Aristotle argues that the things that the things that fall under one category cannot fall under another.
The unmovedmover is a particular with universal power. If it were a universal it would not exist. According to Plato, the universals do not have causal powers, they are causally inert, nevertheless things participate in them, but it is not something that the universals themselves change for it to happen.
Ockham would argue that we should not multiply entities without reason. So Ockham would argue then that the entity of universals cannot exist, because they lack causal powers, and since the prime mover is not universal, but a particular, so it exists.
One final objection against platonism is that platonism suggests a gradual notion of being/existence. The genera and the ideas are somehow superior and more real than their instantiations so the particular things are on a minor degree of being whilst universals take on higher and higher degrees of being up until the One – which even God is inferior than. This doesn’t make sense for aristotle, because things either exist or they don’t. Not one human is more human than the other, but this seems very possible in the platonic framework.
Plotinus was very much aware of the incompatibility of christianity and his philosophy.
Nominalism is the radically opposite idea, the only things that truly exist are particulars. Lebniz and Ockham were nominalists. Nominalists should then have to give an account of why we have to work with universals. A radical version of nominalism exist in the 20th century, which suggests that universals are just habits of thinking and linguistic structures in a language system. Ultimately we need universals, a world full of particulars is not encountarable so we need to find pragmatic tools that reduce complexity; one such is to subsume particulars under universals. Categories are boxes in which we can put things to treat them as similar; thought economy becomes a keyword in the 20th century.
Conceptualism/moderate nominalism is a less radical version of nominalism. They argue that universals are not arbitrary, something in the universals capture something in reality. There is a similarity that we discover in things which allow us to group similar things together. But the system of rubriks we use can vary, and the universals do not exist as such, but have a kind of counterpart in the different properties of things.
Universals are therefore considered merely abstract entities. Being abstract means that they don’t exist in reality, but exist only mind-independently and are isolated in thought.
According to the diagnosis of nominalism, platonism mixes up epistemology and universals with the actual structure of reality.
Some historians of philosophy claim that nominalism tends towards atheism, marxist historians of philosophy have argued that nominalism goes against spooky entities – and once you are on that train you’ll see that angels and others things won’t exist either, then maybe you can conclude atheism as well.
We tend to think of natural laws as universal structures, but the laws themselves have no causal impact, so what makes it valid is rather the causal particulars that interact with each other. This makes statements of natural laws possible, with them remaining abstractions.
Augustine argues that perhaps the human mind is 1 in virtue of being three-thronged – and as such is similar to God. A triple structure that turns the 1 into a unity. Hegel and Schelling argue something similar on this principle.
Some say that nominalism is anti-aristotelian. This is not true. Most nominalists are pure aristotelians and think of themselves as more real aristotelians than platonists.
Nominalism brought in ideas of conceptual relativity, like that of Quine.
In someone like Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, claims that we make up the world in different ways and these ways are studied and all that matters is that the world can be projected onto experience – this is essentially arbitrary and doesn’t really matter that much.
Being human is something that all human beings are similar in but completely dissimilar from non-human beings.
Nominalists hold a good explanation in this regard.
Goodman tries to be as radical as possible and tries to demolish the notion of similarity and saying that this is a purely arbitrary conception, when in fact we can group and categorise things as we please.
Leibniz has an idea of a complete definition of a particular which humans can’t know but which God knows, like a complete description of the particular in question.
Theory of narrative identity: individual identity not grasped by definition but covered by a story. Follows completely unique individuals that only pick out one thing.
Moderate realism provides a slightly alternative reading of Aristotle, that is usually associated with thomistic tradition. They will ultimately say that the nominalists are right, there are no mind-dependent universals, but they are fundamentally grounded in nature and the properties of things – that is the whatness of things, their quiddities. The quiddity of something tells us what nature it has. Ultimately the claim is that things fall under universals in virtue of having essences, which comes from latin essentia, beinghood. This is how universals are grounded, and this is how they form species, genera and have them fall under categories. This is how Aquinas interprets Aristotle.
No free-floating universals, but the ideas exist in the mind of God, so they are mind-dependent. But they become real by being instantiated in creation. Can particular essences, be grasped? They are there to be discovered, and what we ultimately need is the essential definition of things. A definition that ultimately tells us what kind of being a certain being is. Sometimes we don’t have that, and then we have to do with a nominal definition – that is how the term is used.
From Leibniz’ point of view, who argues that essences belong to the particulars, argue that we only have nominal definitions of things, which allows us to group them together.
Moderate realism will hold that universals exist only in virtue of being instantiated. Species cannot die out for them, only their members. A species is not alive so it does not die out. A species however has a history based on their members. For Platonists it is impossible to say that dinosaurs don’t exist anymore. Every species fall under a genus, and each of these can be defined, but the definition of the genera may have empty spaces for potentially opposite determinations.
Moderate realism is in a position in which it can be attacked from both sides. Hegel was very much against moderate realism. He accuses it of common sense thinking, which is bad for Hegel, it is too close and friendly with particulars, whilst what really matters are universal. Our common sense thinking is somehow too geared to the particular. Ultimately philosophers should think of the universal only and leave the particular behind. On the other hand, the nominalist critique attacks essentialism and says that these essences are dubious entities. They define what things are but do not exist in themselves so what can they be?
If you cannot make up your mind, you may prefer agnosticism. You can always become an agnostic. The most famous of which is Kant. Kant critiques traditional traditional metaphysics in his project of metaphysics, because reality in itself is unknowable to us. We only know things insofar as they are given to us and we conceptualise them. From Kant’s point of view, the ontological status of universals are premature, because we do not have a grasp of mind-independent reality. We can say something about the role universal conceptions play in our thinking, but no further, because this is only a reality of appearance.
Whether Kant is a metaphysician or an anti-metaphysician is debated among philosophers.