This is the flip side of the problem of universals, where the challenge was accounting for the humanity that belongs to Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Now we’re asking, not how it is that they all belong to the same species, but how it is that they come to be four separate members of that species. We can also pose the question in this way: how or why is humanity divided into Groucho, Harpo, me, and my brother, the way that the genus animal is divided into many species, like human, giraffe, and elephant? Ancient and medieval philosophers did pose the question like that, and added that
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