Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

in Chapter 2 and there it was noted that the relational properties of an object are critical — indeed it is the relational properties that lift ‘things’ into being ‘somethings'. Here though, we are considering objects in a different way. We are asking, are objects simple things, or are they always a combination of things? Universals suggest there are no simple objects — any object must have its universal component as well as its normal presence as a thing in the observable world. At a simple level, we could say that a universal is a type of relation — a way of comparing an object with other objects that display similar qualities. It is, after all, only by comparison with other things that an object can be perceived at all, so taking a universal as a relation makes sense and ties in neatly with what was observed back in Chapter 2. At a more complex level though, this idea of an object needing its ‘universal’ component is starting to look at universals as a more mysterious version of ‘form’. We will be exploring this in more detail below.

So far, in this discussion, we have been assuming that there’s a real world out there, which universals are helping to describe. Universals are, on the face of it, not threatening. It could just be said that they’re about the way language is used and leave it at that, or it could be said that universals are just a convenient way of categorising objects. Universals are useful if they are not considered in too much detail! Whether universals really exist is then less of a pressing question — their usefulness can be appreciated without them becoming problematic. But dig into universals too deeply and there is just an endless regress of one sort

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