Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

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 or another — universals of universals of universals. And to insist on their independent reality is to land us with problems. Then there is a plunge into a mysterian realm of ghostly existence, beyond the everyday world of the senses. Unfortunately, a good many Western philosophers took this plunge!

On this mysterian view of universals, we could say that the Platonic forms are the universals behind everyday objects. This puts universals more into the mysterian category of form we examined in Chapter 2. Plato’s forms will be considered in more detail below, along with further ideas that create similar mysterian splits in the way we see the world. But first, let’s take a look at an idea from ancient China. Kung-Sun Lung’s paradox — ‘a white horse is not a horse’

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