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The Logical Destiny of Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

William Hester
William Hester*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, N. C.
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Extract

The nature of universals became an explicit problem for Western philosophy with Socrates. From the Milesians on, the search for a fundamental substance underlying and connecting all phenomena implied the conception; but it was not until Socrates disentangled the question of universality from that of reality in his theory of definitions that it emerged as the traditional problem we know, and one even capable of solution. In so doing, Socrates may be called the founder of a type of inquiry at once abstract and yet specific which we characterize as “phenomenological”. But Plato, coming immediately after him, again muddied the waters by re-introducing the notion of reality in the Ideas before philosophers had a chance to profit by the separation of the two difficulties. In this manner the composite problem was passed on to Aristotle, who, though he differed in his conception of the nature of the reality, nevertheless considered it involved. And from Aristotle the confusion was handed down to posterity, culminating in the deadlock of the theological debates of the Middle Ages.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1942, pp. 233 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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References

1 Cf. Aristotle, Met. 12, 4, 1078B—“Socrates did not give his universals, or his definitions, separate existence …”; and Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 1, 10—“He did not dispute about the nature of things as most other philosophers disputed …”

2 I Corinthians, 15:27.

3 Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 181-182.

4 Ibid., p. 169.

5 Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 76.

6 Since Russell views the difference psychologically rather than phenomenologically, the first type is for him almost always confined to perception and the second to conception; such restrictions have no place here. Cf. Nicolai Hartmann, Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 2nd Ed., p. 183ff. With a similar reservation, one may allude to Bergson's distinction of “absolute” and “relative” knowledge.

7 Negative resemblance (contrast) is reducible to a special case of comparison whenever the involved objects are analysable; when they are not we have simple distinction, which is knowledge by acquaintance.

8 Space, in Appearance, being reducible to definite places or positions. Cf. Spengler on the Greek conception of space.

9 I speak of redness in a grammatical way only. The redness and the red itself are the same, the former word being used only to suggest reference to some other physiomatic element with which it is connected in our consideration. The form of abstraction which language tends to suggest here is pernicious, for we are apt either to reify the redness as a different being from the red (thus committing ourselves to realism), or else to think of it only as an empty name (thereby subscribing to nominalism).

10 Principia Mathematica, 1st Ed., p. 75.

11 If this were false, then any classification or law would be impossible for lack of a genus, e.g. all universal propositions.

12 Eaton, General Logic, p. 262.

13 R. Aaron, Two Senses of the Word UNIVERSAL, in Vol. XLVIII, No. 190.