The Problem of Universals

[@GoAlamo]

I saw you on Gospel Tangents a long time ago and found you again during the pandemic. I love your lectures so much and look forward to each submission every week. Thank you so much for all your effort.

[@wlsallnight]

Thanks for taking me back to my undergraduate days when Gustav Bergmann would try to explain this to us at Iowa. Your opening is very similar to how Bergmann's best student, Edwin Allaire, then at Iowa later at Texas, would intro the problem. This in 1967. Enjoy all your presentations.

[@CirclingDuck]

I personally prefer your philosophical lectures and loved this one! Thank you for another great talk :)

[@realLsf]

Thanks for all you do, John. Your lectures have been a great help to me in understanding our faith 🙏❤️✝️

[@senefelder]

Shoutout for Professor Peter Adamson! His podcast is fantastic

[@RileyRampant]

This is a presentation where a 2d viewing yields extra dividends. I'm fascinated that the medieval chruch was able to absorb what it found useful about Aristotle's materialism, without being off-put by (instead eliding) its implications.

[@longcastle4863]

There is a reality out there, but we can never “know” it; we can just break it down into human constructs that are useful to us. Which seems to me to be enough, even though we know our human constructs are never an absolute mirror of the reality that is really out there.

[@GodlessCommie]

It’s hard to take a hard stance on either of these positions because they both have good points. I’ll have to look more into the topic.

[@sebolddaniel]

John could have played in the NFL, but decided to do this instead. Speaking of stained glass windows, have you seen National Lampoon's stained glass window of Saint Onan?

[@Stadtpark90]

And I thought, that the man with the Orange exclusively belongs to the German speaking part of KZbin 😂 Josef Gaßner “Von Aristoteles zur Stringtheorie”

[@DavidButler-m4j]

Your philosophical argument side steps the nature of the limits being human in order to discuss transcendent notions.

[@ncarmstron]

Would it be accurate to say that “universal” is synonymous with “absolute”?

[@zelenisok]

no.. it can be understood as an (abstract) idea of something. so we have an idea of tree, but there are many individual /concrete trees.

[@ubertrashcat]

​@@zelenisok and according to realists those aren't abstract but exist in the same manner that anything concrete exists... it's fascinating that this was a big deal for such a long time

[@bothewolf3466]

I envision Pluto's thoughts as being largely a version of Venn diagrams.

[@IZENmeme]

Excellent overview. The tension between Platonic Universalists and nominal relativists has implications for humans in some of the big controversies today. Consider,:- 'Some people know there are two sorts of people, (male-female) others think it is a lot more complicated than that...'

[@elizabethdesousa8290]

Very applicable. Thank you for sharing

[@elizabethdesousa8290]

Very applicable. Thank you for sharing

[@batmann2723]

Except the fact that it actually is neurologically much more complicated than that just proves further against realism, you assumed it was completely binary because you believe that your perception is objective law when it isn't and is constantly proven wrong, because there isn't objective realism its entirely based on our perspective at any given time which is constantly changing

[@longcastle4863]

When it comes to male female, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Biological and science come to the fore..

[@EricEngle-f1q]

I wrote a book about the question of universals in the context of law, if legal philosophy is your thing find "Post Positivism" (2014) in your law library or inter-library loan. The chapter drafts are available as articles on my ssrn site.

[@AquariusGate]

This seems to be an issue with two distinct characteristics of language. It describes and also defines. That is to say, words describes feelings and things in the world. The term also defines what associations can make or held up on relation to the subject matter. There is no definitive definition, its a continuous process that includes redefining things.

[@thewaywardtrio]

I think Aristotle laid a pretty great for the necessity of something like 'forms' in his metaphysics.

[@stevenglowacki8576]

I'm not sure why "orange" was used as a starting point, because there is a very easy definition that can be seen as universal: light with a wavelength between 585 and 620 nm.

[@mehowop]

Wavelength of light is not reality, its description of what we percive. You comment is good start for topic "why science is usefull ficiton". Science meassure things, meassure by definition is description. Description of something is not something. Map of city is not city ( map is ficitonal, city is reality ). Science is description of shadows on wall in cave ( using Plato ). So science is not like: /human - science - reality/ , relation. But science is like: /science - human - reality/. Color is real and wave length is only description ( not real if we will treat ideas that are not part of experience as a fiction ). When you treat wave lenght as reality, its like treating seflie of person as a person and real person as a ficiton. When you look at tree, its reality. When you read about tree in some book, its description of reality. Any device that meassure lenght of wave must be calibrated, without it you can say that orange have wave length of 1 or 1000 or 123 or 452523523 and all of that numbers are possible valid numbers ( any value that can go out of meassure device is valid, SOOOO if you can read negative values than you can have lenght of -12345 and call it orange... ). Result of meassure is only result of meassure ( description )

[@DavidButler-m4j]

I prefer commenting to subscribing because getting on someone's list means becoming an nonentity. By commenting, I enter a realm beyond the like.

[@langreeves6419]

? It's incredibly easy to do both, and you enter a whole new realm

[@DavidButler-m4j]

I don't subscribe because I comment widely, and I prefer to retain my anonymity. Something some of us value hugely.@@langreeves6419

[@Exit311]

A thing is only real if it rhymes with something else

[@charlesmendeley9823]

Trying to find a rhyme for pyramid. Are compound words such as "pan with lid" allowed?

[@canisronis2753]

Universal = Logos / Nominal = Word

[@anhumblemessengerofthelawo3858]

God is unity

[@williamcary8029]

Calling the naming of oranges a generalization seem unreal when what is actual is is an Agreement. Math equations are also agreement. If 6 people look at an orange and 5 all call it orage on one calls a peach you get disruption and annoyance where the single person is called crazy. We agree that things are named as such. That agreement has weight.

[@emilbordon1329]

Lots of cheeses can also be orange - the colour not the fruit although someone out there may be a manufacturer of cheese with orange bits in it, actual fruit and not the colour.

[@Jersey-towncrier]

Why does it seem so obvious to me that it's really just a confusion of parts of speech--general nouns with adjectives. Aren't we just treating adjectives as nouns themselves, and getting confused in the process? And if not, then what is the response to this?

[@longcastle4863]

Nietzsche and Wittgenstein would probably agree with you, I think.

[@dennisware1136]

A very interesting lecture. At 38:00 ""Things in the material world are participating imperfectly in forms (eternal ideas)." Plato declares his anthropocentrism. It took me a lifetime to see that the proposition is reciprocal: ideas are imperfect models of what exists. Also, ideas are an emergent reality generated by a neural network connected to the rest of what exists by sensory organs and muscles, informed by a culture imbedded in a history. Different people, different ideas. No people, no ideas: which doesn't sound particularly eternal. I have caught up to Aristotle. What's next?

[@Jersey-towncrier]

Please...take them...

[@TheTrueReiniat]

no problems with universals, only in our ignorance we don't understand them enough.

[@barnabuskorrum4004]

wow so wise... amazing. /s

[@TheTrueReiniat]

@@barnabuskorrum4004 but it is likely that there is something we don't understand about our fundamental reality that would explain universals. Think about geocentrism and how people had the intuition that it wasn't correct for hundreds of years before heliocentric models were first designed and then in turn those models were wrong for hundreds of years before we had Newtonian mechanics.

[@canisronis2753]

Ignorance is one of the universals of the human mind, the others are Arrogance, Credulity and Fragility.

[@Jersey-towncrier]

She got a crazy Adams apple

[@shanejohns7901]

When we divided the colors up into 'Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet', those slices were pretty damn arbitrary. There's nothing to say that another intelligent species would divide the visible spectrum up precisely the same way we do. There's nothing to say that another intelligent species would even see the same color range as we do. So insofar as universals are concerned, I don't think things like 'red' or 'horse' work as universals. Neither do numbers, because numbers are ENTIRELY dependent on an arbitrary number 'base'. Like we normally use Base 10. But Computer programmers often use Base2 (binary) or Base16 (hex). The number base one chooses is entirely arbitrary. The value of the number may be fixed in some places in nature (eg. free-fall speed, etc.). But that value can't be THOUGHT without a number system to contain it. Even something like 'mammal' doesn't work as a universal, because there will likely be a time when there are no more mammals. Reality is in 'flux'. A 'horse' works as a universal for practical reasoning purposes, even though someday we know horses will not exist. And we may no longer exist at that time as well! But I think it'd be silly looking to find 'horseness' off of planet Earth, whether today or after the last horse dies off on Earth. You may, however, find something like 'bipedality' or 'quadrapedality' to exist beyond Earth, if animal life is found beyond Earth.

[@Flynbourne]

The thing is that science can actually answer these questions quite well now. We know how the eye responds to different wave lengths and how the brain then interprets those. We know that some people have different rods and cones and perceive colour differently. We also know that language can influence how we define colours especially around the edges between different colours. This isn’t a huge mystery any more.

[@charlesmendeley9823]

John only uses the orange as one single example, but he is pointing towards the totality of all words, including concrete objects, abstract concepts and elusive categories such as Deity. Defining a color is only a tiny fraction of defining a house, a chair, a democracy, a German, a dollar, a friendship, the Trinity.

[@001variation]

The question is not “what wavelength of light is orange”, it’s “does the concept of orange exist apart from any particular example or orange”

[@anhumblemessengerofthelawo3858]

13:30 Let's not make the error of thinking that Yahweh is the One Infinite Creator. No, Yahweh is but the creator of a man. He took the genetic material of those still living on mars -- but who destroyed their atmosphere due to warfare -- mixing it with apes and in the case of Jews, their own super spiritual DNA. The god of the Old Testament is not the Infinite Creator, any more than when a scientist splices the DNA of a frog and a salamander and mixes them together.

[@noahbody9782]

Altruistic behaviour is a good working definition for good while selfish behaviour is a good working definition for evil. Throughout the animal kingdom altruistic behaviour has become eponymous in the form of adult species caring for their offspring. This characteristic appears to be advantageous to the survival of the species. It is not hard to see how extending this across an entire species might also be advantageous.

[@EricEngle-f1q]

eidetic realism is best explained just like this. for the eidetic realists ideas are real things, they have an objective existence independant of and prior to their material manifestations. for this variety of realist "thoughts are things". Most probably all eidetic realists are dualists, distinguishing the eidos (forms) from hyle, matter. note however that the term "realism" in foreign policy refers to a very different idea, which is that physical violence is the ultimate arbiter of state-to-state relations and that all state policy however constructed must be based on that fact, alongside the weaker proposition that all states are rational power maximizers.

[@vhawk1951kl]

no, a " universal is all, none etc, everyone eveything-the universe etc are universals