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But since we must begin somewhere, let us ask: is the idea of a river (a universal) more real than the raging waters of the River Maeander (a particular) at this moment? or less real? or differently real?
The debate may have begun with Heraclitus, an ancient Greek thinker who said that "we never step twice into the same river." In the time it takes us to move our rear foot forward for that second step, water has continued to rush forward, the banks have shifted a bit, and the river is no longer the same.
Heraclitus is often interpreted as suggesting a skeptical conclusion from this observation. Since nothing ever stays the same from moment to moment, any knowledge we may think we have is obsolete before we acquire it. He might also have been suggesting that names are an artificial way to impose stability on the flux of reality -- by calling this a "river" I pretend that it is one entity. This would make of him the first nominalist.
Much in the philosophy of Plato may be understood as an answer to Heraclitus, especially to the skeptical implications of his writings. For Plato, our intellect can contemplate the same river any number of times, for river as an idea, as a form, remains always the same. There is a sharp distinction between the world of the senses and the world of the intellect: one can only have opinions about the former, but one can have knowledge, justified true belief, about the latter. For just that reason, the intelligible world is the real world, the sensible world is only provisionally real, like the shadows on the wall of a cave.
It must be noted that the Platonic notion of timeless ideas, or forms, isn't confined to universals. Particular terms, too, can be understood as the name of an intelligible form. So although river is a form, Meander is also a form, and "the Meander as it was at noon last Friday" is a form. Even "Heraclitean flux" is a form, and as such flexlessly timeless! There are paradoxes aplenty here, and Plato himself explored them in a dazzlingly dialectical dialogue, Parmenides.
But at least part of what Plato meant to convey is that River, as a universal, is a timeless idea in which the mutable rivers partially participate, as the material world is an imperfect mirror of the really real world. Plato, accordingly, was the first realist.
His student, Aristotle, disagreed with both Plato and Heraclitus. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into "formal causes," the blueprints implicit in material things. Where Plato idealized geometry, Aristotle practiced biology, and his thinking always returns to living beings. Consider an oakThis article is about oak trees and shrubs. OAK is also the three-letter IATA airport code for Oakland International Airport in Oakland, California USA. See also Oak, Nebraska, USA. See List of Quercus species The term oak can be used as part of the commo tree. This is a member of a species, and it has much in common with all the oak trees of generations past, and all those that shall come. Its universal, its oakness, is a part of it. Accordingly, Aristotle was much more sanguine than either Heraclitus or Plato about coming to know the sensible world. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness, finding the intelligble order within the sensible world. Such views made Aristotle a realist as to universals, but a new sort of realist. One might call his view moderate realism .
"This nature" he said, meaning a universal, "has a dual being: one in singular things, another in the soul, and both draw accidents to that nature just mentioned. In singular things it has, after all, a multiple being through the diversity of those singular things. But nevertheless is the being of those things not compulsive for that nature, according to its first consideration, namely the absolute."
In other words, oakness exists in the particular trees, as well as in the soul of the biologist studying them. The "being in the things is not compulsive" in that the form itself, oakness, doesn't change though particular oaks die.
As the middle ages waned and the RenaissanceLeonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, an example of the blend of art and science during the Renaissance The Renaissance was a great cultural movement which brought about a period of scientific revolution and artistic transformation, at the dawn of modern Eur approached, European intellectuals switched their allegiances to nominalism. The new Heraclitus of this period was William of OckhamWilliam of Ockham (also Occam or any of several other spellings) (ca. 1285- 1349) was a English Franciscan friar and philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. William was devoted to a life of extreme poverty and minimalism.. "I maintain" he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject ... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in anima]." As a general rule, Ockham disbelieved in any entities that were not necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside Socrates. Nothing is explained by that. This method of proceeding has since come to be called Ockham's razor, and it has had a career outside of the problem of universals.
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