Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

human explains my being rational and alive. So how could it be nothing at all? Abelard responds with an example (§92). Suppose a slave of ancient Rome is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum. His refusing to go is a status, and it explains something, namely why he was beaten. But we are surely not tempted to say that his refusing to go to the forum is actually a thing in its own right. Rather, the man who refuses, and is beaten for it, is a thing. His refusing to go is just a status, one that he lives to regret. This leaves the way clear for Abelard to give his own, positive account of the universal, which is that it is nothing more, or less, than a word. Universality is like the tense of a verb, an unavoidable aspect of our language that does not correspond to anything out in the world. Rather, we produce universality through a mental process of extracting some shared feature of things. In my mind, I take the four Marx Brothers and remove from them the accidental features that vary from one person to another. What I am left with is a common idea that would apply equally to any human