ABSTRACT universal Bedienungsanleitung PDF herunterladen (Seite 4)

disagree with an early critic of this conception, Norman Kemp Smith, when

he writes:

It has, of course, been usual to deﬁne the universal as ‘the one in the many,’

meaning by ‘the many’ numerically distinct particulars. But what, we may well

ask, are we being committed to, when required to interpret ‘the one in the

many’ in this other very diﬀerent sense which renders it applicable to each

particular thing or self? If the original meaning of the term ‘universal’ involves

its distinction from the term ‘particular,’ can this meaning, by any legitimate

process of analogy, be so extended as to render the term synonymous with the

particular? A term cannot signify its own opposite, not even if that opposite be

a counterpart which it presupposes for its own completion. The term

‘husband’ does not signify ‘wife,’ though each term has meaning only in and

by reference to the other.

Here, it may seem, the Idealists’ attempt to think dialectically unfortunately

got the better of them, and led to the absurdity of treating the individual as a

universal, and thus as concrete, simply on the grounds that individuals can

resemble univers als in standing a ‘one-over-many’ relation to their attributes

just as a universal can stand in a ‘one-over-many’ relation to their instances,

and so both combine identity with a diversity. It may appear the best that

can be done at this poin t is to say that these British Idealists were using the

term ‘universal’ in a sui generis manner;

but this is to admit that what at

ﬁrst looked like a substantive but dubious doctrine is in the end no more

that a terminological shift, with little apparent rationale.

Kemp Smith, ‘The Nature of Universals’, 145. Cf. also Michael B. Foster, ‘The Concrete

Universal: Cook Wilson and Bosanquet’, Mind, 40 (1931) No. 157: 1–22, esp. p. 7, where he speaks

about the ‘well-known and paradoxical doctrine, derived from Bradley, that the concrete universal

is the individual’, and asks whether ‘it is not simply an abuse of language to call the individual

‘‘universal’’ at all’. Another contemporary critic of this view is John Cook Wilson:

A notable example of loose thinking about unity in diversity is the modern

representation of the individual as a universal because it is a unity in the diversity of its

qualities, &c. This doctrine, which is taken as advanced metaphysics, is nothing but

deplorable confusion, due to a mere verbal analogy helped out by the metaphysician’s

inclination to paradox, and the absurdest results may be developed from it. The unity

of the universal in its particulars is totally diﬀerent from the unity of the individual

substance as a unity of its attributes (or attribute-elements). The particulars of a

universal are not elements in its unity.

(John Cook Wilson, Statement and Inference, edited by A. S. L. Farquharson,

2 vols, corrected edn (Oxford, 1969), Vol. I, p. 156 n1)

It is likely that Cook Wilson’s later reference to ‘the puerilities of certain paradoxical recent

authors’ on the topic of universals is also a reference to this Bradleyan view (see ibid., 348).

Cf. Mander, ‘Bosanquet and the Concrete Universal’, 301:

Bosanquet’s understanding of the word ‘universal’ is a very generous one. Any

connection which brings together any sort of many under one heading, any union or

connection or identity, any mechanism that allows any kind of general talk, for

Bosanquet, is a universal.

118 ROBERT STERN

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... 38 39

Kommentare zu diesen Handbüchern

Keine Kommentare

ABSTRACT universal Bedienungsanleitung Seite 4

Kommentare zu diesen Handbüchern