Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

This problem, which comes from classical antiquity, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is a problem today for science, or what we consider scientific in the true sense, but the heated dispute in the late Middle Ages, with nominalistic and realistic.

All part of a written Boethius (480-525 AD), in the early Middle Ages, who used a text (univesal quarrel) of Isagoge Porphyry (234-309 AD), see illumination-text side (photo), which stated:

“So he will avoid talking about the genders and species, on the question of whether they are subsistent realities in themselves or only consist of mere mental concepts or are tangible or intangible, or are separate or if there in sensible things and depend on them, since it relates to a matter that requires a thorough treatment and requires more examination.”¹

The problem come the middle ages and was instrumental in establishing a first idea of ​​rationalism, through logic and the construction of knowledge, but at the end of the Middle Ages, the so-called low average age the problem almost disappeared.

It was Peter Abelard, a monk who was player of Origen, who restated the thesis as a reinterpretation of the rank of species and genera Porphyry, but said the words (names) describe the world do not refer to the words in the physical sense (the sounds we emit when we speak), but the words as carriers of meaning.

It was through the reading of the writings of Aristotle on the soul and metaphysics, which in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus developed sophisticated forms of realism, however in the fourteenth century Wilheim of Ockham rejected the Aristotelian idea that intellectual knowledge resulted from the fact that our lie were informed by universal ideas resulting from perceived objects, replaces it with the Ockham’s razor.

Ockham’s razor is the idea that between a simple explanation of a certain thing and another complex, we get the simplest and therefore there is no “universal” that are innate.

For realists, a universal is a predicate being of others (or especially) all other entities. It exists objectively, as much as reality itself, transcendent in relation to the particular (Latin: universal ante rem) or as immanent in the individual things.

^{1Porfírio. Isagoge. Introduction, translation and notes of Juan José García Norro and Rogelio Rovira. Trilingual edition (Greek, Latin and Spanish). Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2003, p. 2-3.}