Moderate Realism

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Metaphysics

Overview

Aristotle and Aquinas locate the universal nature inside the particular thing itself, not in a separate realm above it: the humanity that makes Socrates human is really there in Socrates, not borrowed from a Form that could exist without him. What makes it universal is the further step the intellect takes, abstracting that shared nature away from what makes Socrates this individual — his height, his history, this moment — and holding it before the mind as one nature graspable in many. For Aristotle, take away every human being and, unlike Plato's Form of Humanity, nothing of the universal is left; it only ever existed in them. Aquinas adds that the natures of things also exist beforehand as ideas in God's mind — not as Forms that things share in, but as the patterns by which God creates them.

Against nominalism, though, moderate realism insists that the concept captures a nature really present in each thing: Socrates and Plato are alike in kind because each of them really has the nature humanity, which the intellect then grasps as one. A nominalist such as Ockham can grant that they really resemble each other — they agree by themselves, not through anything they share — so the quarrel is over that common nature, not over whether the likeness is real. The position earns its middle status by holding what Plato affirms and nominalism denies — a real universal nature — while denying what Plato affirms and nominalism does not need to — that the nature can exist apart from the particulars that have it.

Position on

• The Problem of Universals

Held by traditions

• Scholasticism

  Question scope: The Problem of Universals

Broader position

• Scholastic Realism

Rival positions

• Nominalism

  Question scope: The Problem of Universals

• Platonic Realism

  Question scope: The Problem of Universals

References

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Universals (moderate realism)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.15 (the ideas in God's mind as the exemplars of created things)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, William of Ockham (individuals agree by themselves, not through a common nature in each)
• Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, ch. 3
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Medieval Problem of Universals, §§8-9 (moderate realism holds that the universal nature is really in the particular; nominalism denies that any universal is a real feature of things)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Medieval Problem of Universals, §§8-9 (moderate realism locates the universal only in the particulars, denying the separate subsistence Platonic realism asserts)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Medieval Problem of Universals