Word Finder - universals

definition

A characteristic or property that particular things have in common.

This involved a change of detail in the theory of essences and of universals generally.

The view (traceable no doubt to the Aristotelian definition) that equity mitigates the hardships of the law where the law errs through being framed in universals, is to be found in some of the earlier writings.

In connexion with the problem of universals, he held that the diversity of individuals depends on the quantitative division of matter (materia signata), and in this way he attracted the criticism of the Scotists, who pointed out that this very matter is individual and determinate, and, therefore, itself requires explanation.

In general, Aquinas maintained in different senses the real existence of universals ante rem, in re and post rem.

In the matter of Universals, Duns was more of a realist and less of an eclectic than Aquinas.

On the question of universals he endeavoured to steer a middle course between the pantheistically inclined realism of Duns Scotus and the extreme nominalism of William of Occam.

Universals must be distinguished according as they have reference to our minds or to the divine mind.

We cannot do more than refer to Charles for discussions as to how this theory of nature is connected with the metaphysical problems of force and matter, with the logical doctrine of universals, and in general with Bacon's theory of knowledge.

The Realists held that universals alone have substantial reality, existing ante res; the Nominalists that universals are mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things and existing post res; while the Conceptualists, mediating between the two extremes, held that universals are concepts which exist in our minds and express real similarities in things themselves.

This passage indicates three possible positions with regard to universals.

This is Realism, which may be of two varieties, according as the substantially existent universals are supposed to exist apart from the sensible phenomena or only in and with the objects of sense as their essence.

Hence it may be said that the universals are in the individuals, constituting their essential reality (and it is an express part of Erigena's system that the created but creative Word, the second division of Nature, should pass into the third stage of created and non-creating things); or rather, perhaps, we ought to say that the individuals exist in the bosom of their universal.

Boetius in commenting upon Porphyry had already started the discussion as to the nature of universals.

He concludes that the genera and species exist as universals only in thought; but, inasmuch as they are collected from singulars on account of a real resemblance, they have a certain existence independently of the mind, but not an existence disjoined from the singulars of sense.

It is possible, as Haureau maintains, that Roscellinus meant no more than to refute the extreme Realism which asserts the substantial and, above all, the independent existence of the universals.

From this may be gathered his views on the nature of universals.

But the Platonically conceived proof of the being of God contained in the Monologion shows that Anselm's doctrine of the universals as substances in things (universalia in re) was closely connected in his mind with the thought of the universalia ante rem, the exemplars of perfect goodness and truth and justice, by participation in which all earthly things are judged to possess these qualities.

From these sources it appears that he professed successively two opinions on the nature of the universals, having been dislodged from his first position by the criticism of Abelard, his quondam pupil.

The doctrine of indifference as it appears in later writers certainly tends, as Prantl points out, towards Nominalism, inasmuch as it gives up the substantiality of the universals.

But, since those universals, so far as they are called genera and species, cannot be perceived by any one in their purity without the admixture of imagination, Plato maintained that they existed and could be beheld beyond the things of sense, to wit, in the divine mind.

The universals are thus forms inherent in things - " native forms," according to the expression by which Gilbert's doctrine is concisely known.

Even the nature of the universals is no longer discussed from a purely logical or metaphysical point of view, but becomes connected with psychological questions.

Interest is no longer to the same extent concentrated on the one question of the universals.

The question of universals, though fully discussed, no longer forms the centre of speculation.

The great age of Scholasticism presents, indeed, a substantial unanimity upon this vexed point, maintaining at once, in different senses, the existence of the universals ante rem, re and post rem.

The universals, therefore, have no existence, as universals, in rerum natura; and Thomas endorses, in this sense, the polemic of Aristotle against Plato's hypostatized abstractions.

While agreeing with Albert and Thomas in maintaining the threefold existence of the universals, Duns Scotus attacked the Thomist doctrine of individuation.

And in a similar spirit he explains the universalia ante rem as being, not substantial existences in God, but simply God's knowledge of things - a knowledge which is not of universals but of singulars, since these alone exist realiter.

Both classifications are of universals, concepts or general terms, proper names of course being excluded.

As has been said it classifies universals as predicates of individuals and thus involves the difficulties which gave rise to the controversy between realism and nominalism.

Aristotle's critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.

Like Plato, he believed in real Universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom.

But what he refused to believe with Plato was that reality is not here, but only above; and what he maintained against Plato was that it is both, and that universals and forms, one and many, the good, are real but not separate realities.

In full, then, a substance is a separate individual, having universals, and things in all other categories, inseparably belonging to it.

It follows that Aristotelianism in the Categories and in the Metaphysics is a realism both of individuals and of universals; of individual substances as real subjects, and of universals as real predicates.

There are therefore two kinds of belongings, universals and attributes; and in both cases belonging in the sense of having no being but the being of the substance.

In brief then the common ground of the Categories and the Metaphysics is the fundamental position that all things are substances having belonging to them universals and attributes, which have no separate being as Plato falsely supposed.

A distinction (chap. 2) is drawn between things which are predicates of a subject (Kae' U?oKEi b tevov) and things which inhere in a subject (iv U7roKEL ivC J); and, while universals are called predicates of a subject, things in a subordinate category, i.e.

The only logical conclusion is that the Categories, being nearer to Plato on the nature of attributes, and still nearer on the relation of universals to substances, is earlier than the Metaphysics.

There are attributes and universals, real as belonging to individual substances, whose being is their being.

But reality consists only of individual substances, numerous, moving, related, active as efficient causes, passive as material causes, essences as formal causes, ends as final causes, and in classes which are real universals only as real predicates of individual substances.

Such is Aristotle's realism of individuals and universals, contained in his primary philosophy, as expressed in the Metaphysics, especially in Book Z, his authoritative pronouncement on being and substance.

In acquiring scientific knowledge, syllogism cannot start from universals without induction, nor induction acquire universals without sense.

While it asserted a realism of individuals, it admitted a conceptualism of universals.

Especially, induction to universals is the warrant and measure of deduction from universals.

He consistently maintained that sense is knowledge of particulars and the origin of scientific knowledge of universals.

On the other hand, as Aristotle over-emphasized deduction so Bacon over-emphasized induction by contending that it is the only process of discovering universals (axiomata), which deduction only applies to particulars.

Mill in his Logic pointed out this defect, and without departing from Baconian principles remedied it by quoting scientific examples, in which deduction, starting from inductive principles, applies more general to less general universals, e.g.

Sigwart, indeed, is deceived both about particulars and universals.

So Sigwart, in order to reduce universals to hypotheticals, while admitting that existence is usually thought, argues that it is not stated in the universal judgment; so also Bosanquet.