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Notes on Russell's chapter 'The World of Universals'
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Bertrand Russell - The Problems of PhilosophyThe World of Universals
● Entities such as relations seem to have a being different from physical objects, minds and
sense data. What is the nature of this being?
○ Plato’s ‘theory of ideas’ is more or less right
● Pick a concept e.g. justice, and look at particular acts/instantiations of that concepts to
find the common nature that all the instantiations ‘partake of’. This nature will be found in what
is just and in nothing else
○ the acts ‘must all...partake of a common nature’ (assumption)
○ these essences are ‘ideas’, ‘forms’ or universals, and exist outside of the
mind
■ they are not particular, so do not exist in the world of
sense
● Proper names stand for particulars, whilst substantives, adjectives, prepositions and verbs
stand for universals
○ pronouns (now, there etc) stand for particulars, but are ambiguous - they
will stand for different particulars in different contexts
○ no sentence can be made without referring to a universal
● We tend to focus on the meaning of particulars rather than universals because universals
seem incomplete and insubstantial without a context
● Philosophers have tended to focus on universals named by adjectives/substantives, which
express properties or qualities of single objects, and not prepositions and verbs, which express
relations between objects
○ this has led to the neglect of relations in metaphysics
● We cannot strictly prove the existence of qualities or properties, but can prove the
existence of relations
○ Berkeley/Hume deny this, claiming that there are no such things as
‘abstract ideas’ of whiteness/triangularity etc, but rather that we form an image of some
particular white thing, or triangle, being careful not to deduce (imagine?) anything which
would not be true of all other white/triangular things
■ but even if there were such a particular object, then the
resemblance it would hold with all white/triangular objects would constitute a
relational universal
● there are many white things, and the fact
that the relation would hold between different particular pairs of white
objects is characteristic of a universal
● if we say that each paired resemblance is
different then we are ‘forced’ to say that the different resemblances
resemble each other, so we have another proof of resemblance as a
relational universal (are we really forced to say this? Presumably W
might suggest that the different resemblances don’t resemble each other
in any obvious, coherent way)
● So universals exist. How can we prove that they aren’t merely mental?
○ a particular proposition e,.g. ‘Edinburgh is north of London’ is true. It is
not caused to be true by our coming to know it, and would be true even without human
existence or minds in the universe (big questions over whether this is true.
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