Now let's look at how Aristotle's theory deals with those three facts about universals that we listed.
First of all, the universal is multiply instantiated, so it appears. It is, after all, one and the same universal, applehood which appears in each apple. But here I think you can see a problem: honestly, how can we make sense of exactly the same thing being in all of these different objects? Because that's what the theory says; to say that different deserts, the Sahara, the Atacama, and the Gobi are all dry places, is just to say that the exact same being, the universal dryness, occurs at each place. Universals must be awfully strange entities if exactly the same universal can exist in many places and times at once. Or so one might think. But maybe that's not so troubling; it seems troubling if you expect universals to be like physical objects, but remember, we?re talking about a totally different category of being. Maybe it's not so strange, then, to say that the exact same universal, dryness, occurs all over the earth at once; after all, there's nothing strange about saying that different deserts can be dry at the same time.
OK, how does Aristotle's theory deal with fact number two? Are Aristotelian universals what we conceive of when we conceive of universals? Perhaps. Now let me explain something about how we form concepts, according to Aristotle. Think of a little girl just forming the concept of human beings. How does she do it? Well, when we form the concept of a universal on Aristotle's theory, we abstract from a lot of the instances we come across. We as it were mentally extract from each thing the quality that they all have in common. So how does the little girl get the concept of a human being? She learns to ignore the details, tall and short, black and white, long hair and short hair, male and female, etc.; and she pays attention to the thing that they all have in common, namely, humanity. On Aristotle's view, the universal humanity is the same in all humans (i.e., all humans have that exact same property in common); and this allows us to form a concept of humanity that applies to all humans.
OK, the third fact: Are Aristotelian universals the sorts of things we refer to when we use general terms, like "redness" and "humanity"? Again, perhaps. The idea is that when we refer to humanity, we refer to the type, human being, that appears identically in each human. We don't refer simply to all the humans, but instead the type, human being, which is the same in each human.
Aristotelianism (that's a fancy long word for "Aristotle's theory"), on the whole, sounds pretty plausible, I think. Except that there may be something peculiar in this talk of the exact same universal being in each thing. So how might one think if one opposed both the views of both Plato and Aristotle on universals?
|
![[Home]](wikipedia.png)