humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:58:12 -0800, Evans Winner
wrote:

>Malrassic Park writes:
>
> A universal is a property such that it is considered
> identical to all members of a class.
>
>I am having difficulty grasping your meaning here. Should
>that read, identical /in/ all members...? Or do you mean
>something along the lines that all members of the class are
>identical to the universal? Would that mean that the
>universal, being identical to the members of the class, was
>thus itself a member of the class?

A universal is a property considered in terms of the identity of the
property between members of a class.

a. Attribute, a characteristic of an entity.
b. Property, an attribute shared in common by all members of a class
of entities.
c. Universal, a term used in recognition of the fact that all members
of the class share, not just a common attribute, but at least one
*identical* property.

Examples of an identitical property in a class, that is, a universal,
would be the redness in the class of red books, or Rand's example of
the manness in the class of men (ITOE, 2), although she omitted the
word "class" because she failed to base her theory of
concept-formation on a theory of class-formation.

To put the problem of universals in Rand's own words: 'To exemplify
the issue as it is usually presented: When we refer to three persons
as "men," what do we designate by that term? The three persons are
three individuals who differ in every particular respect and may not
possess a single identical characteristic (not even their
fingerprints).'

The statement of the issue is a word-salad in the sense that no two
sets of fingerprints are ever alike, or identical. But everything else
she wrote is accurate enough. I would suggest that she should have
added, parenthetically, "not even in their reason." Because every man
reasons differently. But if reason is a property of men, and moreover,
a property universal to all men, then the reason in each man should be
identical. This implies that it is not "reason" itself we are
considering here, but something in reason's concept that is identical
to each member of the class of men, a level of purity of concept which
completely abstracts from all differences in reason among men and then
is distilled down to an essence that never changes. These properties
are the essence of reason itself, without any one of of which it would
cease to be reason. The ability to find this property, which in terms
of a concept, and not a class, becomes its principle, is essential to
reasoning itself.
--
We usually go over the top w/ our new found freedoms.
Unfortunately, her 'followers' are as radical as Pat
Robertson's. Discernment goes out the window.
- A youtube poster