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. Take away every human being and, unlike Plato's Form of Humanity, nothing of the universal is left; it only ever existed in them.

Against nominalism, though, moderate realism insists the likeness abstracted is not the mind's invention: Socrates and Plato are really, not just verbally, alike in kind, and that real likeness is what grounds the concept rather than the concept manufacturing it. 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

Incompatible 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, On Being and Essence
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Medieval Problem of Universals, §1 (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, §1 (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