phi201 - lect 1 - wk 10

Abelard's counterargument: Difference between universals and particulars disappears. The individual Socrates is 'universal' in relation to his humanity and singular in relation to his Socrateity. Another way of putting this point is that it doesn't make any difference whether you talk about Socrates or a human being, if you talk about a human being you talk about a human being in relation to it's humanity. It makes no difference if we refer to 'socrates' or 'a human being'; all that exists are individuals. Nothing on this picture exists as a whole in many simultaneously. So it is a misleading 'spin' of William's to describe this view as a realism.

How should we talk about universals?

5. Nominalism and agreement in 'status': Abelard's positive theory

'universal' means 'predicable of many' for Abelard. This can't conceivable occur in 2 ways. As an entity present in many or as an entity that applies to many in the natural world. Abelard only recognises the real existence of the matter.

Abelard: Socrates and Plato agree in no thing. He puts it like this: They do not agree in a human being, (Which is William's formulation) but in being human, a 'status'.

This can sound like they are playing with words, as though he is invoking an entity which is in some way not a thing. <- 'weak source'.

There is a better way to look at it which makes Abelard's point clearly coherent: Socrates and Plato agree in status because the proposition that Plato is human agree is truth-value. Both are true. They don't agree in status with respect to being writers of dialogues. The proposition that Plato wrote dialogue is true and the prop. that Socrates wrote dialogues is fake they disagree in truth-value.

In both eyes a pair of propositions exist. You don't get an extra thing existing because of the agreement in the first pair.

Next topic: Medieval Epistemology

Question: What is going on in you when you see/perceive a cow in front of you, come to know that there is a cow in front of you, and later think about cows after the cow in question has wandered off.

In the early med. picture seeing a cow causes an image/representation of the form in your mind. Thinking about cows later is another way of calling up an image in imagination. Like seeing a cow, only fainter, less vivid. Medievals, to their credit, clearly separated these issues. Two major parts of medieval approach. Aristotelian and Platonic.

More precisely, we have a relatively pure Aristotelianism a hybrid of Aristotelianism and Platonism. The Platonising tendency derives in large part from the approach of the Arabic thinker Avicenne (Iba Snna), which ends up cross-bred with the Latin Augustinian tradition rsulting in what Etienne Gilson calls "Avicennising Augustinian' and what Spade calls the Augustinian Destinal Complex.