Intro to Metaphysics Part 2

 

Aristotle Metaphysics

Part 2

Realism

 

          You might think that Plato has gone off the rail a bit; Aristotle certainly thought so.

Although something like Plato’s theory is very hard to avoid.

 Universals

          Over and above this or that particular triangle, we have the universal “triangularity”; over and above this or that particular human being, we have the universal “humanness”; over and above this or that particular red thing, we have the universal “redness”; in general, each particular thing seems to instantiate or exemplify various universal features. The particular things are unique and non-repeatable, but the features they exemplify (e.g. “humanness”) are repeatable and common to many things, hence “universal’.

 Numbers and other mathematical entities.

          Numbers are not physical objects: the numeral “2” isn’t the number 2 any more than the name “George” is the same thing as the man George.

 Numbers are not purely mental: we discover them rather than invent them. They are in someway “out there” waiting for us to find them and thus cannot depend for their truth on our thinking about them.

They are necessary truths rather than contingent ones.

To know that 2+2=4 is to know a necessary truth, one that could not have been otherwise. It would remain true even if the entire universe collapsed in on itself.

 Propositions.

          Statements about the world, whether true or false, which are distinct from the sentences that express them. “John is a bachelor” and “John is an unmarried man” are different sentences, but they express the same proposition. When Socrates and Ben Gallant think that snow is white, they are thinking exactly the same thing, despite the fact that one of them expresses this thought in Greek in the Athens of the 5^th century B.C., and the other in English in 21^st century Canada.

Being different from any sentence, or indeed from any other sequence of physical sounds or shapes we might use to express them, propositions are in some sense distinct from the material world. But since a proposition is either true or false whether or not we happen to be entertaining it—again, 2+2=4 would be still be true even if we forgot this tomorrow, 2+2=5 would be false even if we all came to believe it, and snow was white long before anyone first saw it—it seems to follow that propositions are also independent of any mind.

 

          The  view that universals, numbers, and/or propositions exist objectively, apart from the human mind and distinct from any material or physical features of the world, is called realism.

It can seem at first glance to be very dry, esoteric, and irrelevant to practical life. But nothing could be further from the truth, as we shall see.