Tuesday of Holy Week

Station: S. Prisca

Quote, from Ogliati's The Key to the Study of St. Thomas:

4. The Problem of Universals
The attitude of St. Thomas on the question of knowledge is closely bound up with his position on another problem which deeply stirred medieval thinkers, especially from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.  I mean the question of universals
Though Scholasticism cannot be artificially confined within the bounds of the conflict waged about the problem of universals, nonetheless...this problem was one of the first to be put forth in the field of pure speculation and absorbed the greatest effort of thought during this period.  When we read the descriptions of these conflicts, and by means of the accurate studies and researches of today assist at the disputations of that time and witness the class between a Roscellin and a St. Anselm, between an Abelard and a St. Bernard, we seem to be viewing a battle in which all the resources of the keenest genius and all the weapons of the finest dialectic were engaged.
And that battle, far from having a purely historic interest, is of vital importance even in our own day.  From time to time, even though under different forms, the same problem crops up again and calls for a solution.  In the epoch of Positivism it is the theory of John Stuart Mill and Taine, entwining itself with ancient Nominalism.  Again, it is the discussion concerning the value of the laws of science.  Once more, it is the distinction of Benedetto Croce between pure concept and empirical and abstract pseudo-concepts.  They are new phases, as Windelband says, "behind which rises the more general and more difficult question whether any metaphysical value belongs to these universal determinations which are the aim of every scientific analysis.  There are scientists today," continues the German historian of philosophy, "who dismiss the question of universals as having been consigned to the scrap-heap long ago, or look upon it as a malady of outgrown infancy.  Until these scientists can tell us with full security and clearness wherein metaphysical reality and the efficacy of what they call natural laws consist, we must always tell them:  mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur."
The problem,--to indicate it briefly,--was born of the seeming contradiction between the universal character of our concepts and the individual charter of things in themselves.
We perceive in ourselves the existence of universal ideas.  We possess a numerous category of intellectual representations that have for their object being in general and the universal determinations of being, independently of matter and of every individualizing note;--in short, we have a knowledge of things that is abstract and universal.  The things accessible to our senses, on the contrary, are particular, individual, concrete.  Being as an object existing outside of us, seems to have properties totally opposed to being as an object conceived by our mind.
Porphyry in his Isagoge raised the question about genera and species, but offered no solution.  Boëthius upheld two contradictory theses.  The first Doctors of the Middle Ages took the dispute up again, and gradually there arose various schools which are usually classified as follows:
1.  Nominalism solves the seeming discord between the real world and the world of thought by denying the existence and possibility of universal concepts.  There are no universal realities in nature, nor are there universal representations in our intellect.  What we believe to be abstract and universal concepts are nothing else than a word, a name, a device, a label for the collective designation of diverse individuals.  Our representations are as individual as the reality that we observe.
2.  Conceptualism recognizes the presence and ideal value of universal representations in our mind, but denies them real value.  In the world of the particular there is no common element realized in each one of them;--there is no universality.  The universal forms of our mind have no corresponding real term in external nature, but are mere concepts, produced by the mind for reasons of subjective exigency.
3.  Exaggerated Realism admits the existence of the universal not only in our thought, but in the reality of things.  The harmony, therefore, between the universal concept and objective reality is evident, because the concept mirrors the real in the exact degree of universality with which it is invested.
4.  Moderate Realism faces the difficulty:  "How can a universal representation be in agreement with a world that contains nothing but individuals," and solves it thus:  It is quite true that things are individual.  But in the individuals we discover common notes, marks of equality, types, identical essences, which, while they have no universality in the single beings, when the intellect considers and views them in relation to the particular subjects in which they are or can be realized, are found to be attributable to each and all.  In other words, in the individuals there is that in which they agree and that by which they differ; without error the mind can perceive the agreement and prescind from the difference.  The universal concept as such (formaliter) is in the intellect only; but it has its potential foundation (est fundamentaliter et potentialiter) in things in the external world.