Aquinas on the Problem of Universals

Abstract

Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals has received a great deal of attention, both from historians and from non-historians alike.1 Even so, the proper understanding of his solution remains a hotly disputed question. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that debates on this score have reached an impasse—with some commentators classifying Aquinas as a realist, others classifying him as a nominalist, and yet others classifying him as something in between (say, as a moderate realist or conceptualist) or even as inconsistent. Brian Leftow provides a good sense of the controversy when he writes: Aquinas ’ theory of attributes is one of the most obscure, controversial parts of his thought. There is no agreement even on so basic a matter as where he falls in the standard scheme of classifying such theories: to Copleston, he is a resemblance-nominalist; to Armstrong, a ‘concept nominalist’; to Edwards and Spade, ‘almost as strong a realist as Duns Scotus’; to Gracia, Pannier, and Sullivan, neither realist nor nominalist; to Hamlyn, the Middle Ages ’ ‘prime exponent of realism, ’ although his theory adds elements of nominalism and ‘conceptualism’; to Wolterstorff, just inconsistent. (Leftow 2003, p. 1)2 The lack of consensus in these debates, as well as the sheer range of interpretations on offer, makes the proper understanding of Aquinas’s views about universals all the more pressing. How are we to understand them? But they also raise a further, second-order question about their difficulty. Why are Aquinas’s views on this issue so hard to classify? 1 For Aquinas’s works, I rely on the following abbreviations: