Abstract
Universals are postulated to satisfy certain explanatory work. They partially ground the nature that objects have. They partially ground objective resemblances between objects. They partially ground causal powers. In effect, objects are as they are, because they instantiate certain universals. At the same time, the Aristotelian maintains that universals require instantiations to exist, i.e., universals are grounded in their instantiations. It is argued in this chapter that the grounding profile attributed to universals by Aristotelians is incompatible with the general grounding profile that any universal –either Platonic or Aristotelian– should have.
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Notes
- 1.
To these requirements it is added that the event cause and the event effect must be spatiotemporally contiguous and that the event cause must precede in time the effect event (see Psillos 2002, 19). For the discussion that is made here, these later requirements are not relevant.
- 2.
An event, from the perspective of an ontology of universals, is essentially the instantiation of a universal or of several universals in one or several objects in a spacetime region.
- 3.
In § 13 above, the explanatory requirements that the regularist conception of causality imposes on property metaphysics have been explained. What was argued there is that the regularist theory does not impose important restrictions. It is compatible with the most liberal forms of nominalism. What is considered here is the problem about what function universals would have for causal relationships understood in the way they are conceived under the regularist perspective, assuming already an ontology of universals.
- 4.
In § 13 above, it has been explained that this conception of causality only requires entities that can function as ‘authentic properties’, but does not seem to require the postulation of universals. It is more demanding as far as it concerns the metaphysics of properties than regularistic theories, but less so than non-reductivist theories. Here, on the other hand, what is at issue is the function that universals would have in counterfactual theories, already assumed an ontology of universals.
- 5.
This also concerns the causal interactions caused by the exercise of the free will of rational agents, assuming that freedom is incompatible with determinism. Whatever the properties whose instantiation makes an agent free, what those properties do is to determine a space of open possibilities of deliberate action.
- 6.
It turns out, then, that there are causal connections that are ‘emergent’ entities, being ungrounded, but ontologically dependent —according to the sense explained above. This happens whenever we are faced with stochastic causal processes and the decisions of free agents.
- 7.
In effect, suppose an irreflexive and transitive relation R. Suppose Rxy and also Ryx, in violation of asymmetry. Then, by transitivity, it would follow that Rxx, which violates irreflexivity.
- 8.
Indeed, if the universal U depends on the nature of x, and the nature of x depends on U, from transitivity it follows that U depends on itself, which conflicts with the irreflexivity of dependence. On the other hand, if the nature of x depends on the universal U, and the universal U depends on the nature of x, then by transitivity it follows that the nature of x would depend on itself.
- 9.
Recall, moreover, that the dependence of instantiations on universals of which they are instantiations is what generates the coherence problem explained in the previous section. Here this dependence is put “into parentheses” to consider—per impossibile—what profile of priority should be assigned to the facts of similarity from an Aristotelian perspective.
- 10.
Remember that one is here examining the priority profile that should be assigned to Aristotelian universals by putting ‘into brackets’ the ontological dependence of instantiations of universals with respect to the universals of which those instantiations are instantiations. Although this type of ontological dependence is obvious, it must be placed here ‘in parentheses’ because otherwise, the coherence problem pointed out in the previous section arises (§ 58). What results is that instantiations would have grounding and dependence priority.
Reference
Psillos, S. (2002). Causation and explanation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Alvarado, J.T. (2020). Transcendent Universals and Ontological Priority. In: A Metaphysics of Platonic Universals and their Instantiations. Synthese Library, vol 428. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53393-9_8
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