Abstract
As mentioned in Chap. 1, I am inclined to believe that naturalism is true. This metaphysical view requires that every existent be concrete (or non-abstract), i.e. spatially and/or temporally located.
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Notes
- 1.
The disjunct ‘temporally located’ is added to allow for Cartesianism in the philosophy of mind, according to which the mind is located in time only, not in space. We can ignore the ‘or’ for our purposes, since the mental is not included as a subject of this book. All the universals examined are material. Since the universals considered are thus in both space and time, I shall assume that what I say about their spatial location applies, mutatis mutandis, to their temporal location.
- 2.
For simplicity, I shall ignore the special case of higher-order universals. However, it is clear that if first-order universals are concrete, then, by the Principle of Spatiotemporally Homogenous Composition, second-order universals must be concrete too; and similarly for universals of any order.
- 3.
If, as MacBride argues (1998, pp. 220–26), there are, or could be, multiply located particulars, they will of course be exceptions.
- 4.
Note that this claim is not affected by the fact that some particulars, viz. scattered particulars, prima facie behave spatially very much like concrete universals. For example, consider the fog in Yangpu District of Shanghai at 06:58 on 25 March 2017 which, being scattered, occupies a discontinuous spatial region. Although in a loose and popular sense it is correct to claim that this fog is, say, 1,100 km from Beijing, this is strictly speaking wrong. For there is no privileged point of the fog that one could non-arbitrarily choose as the relatum of the distance relation. Perhaps there are pragmatic considerations that make it apt to choose one point rather than another, say, where the fog is most dense. But any such point is still only part of the fog. Thus, the fog is not multiply located, and similarly for other scattered particulars.
- 5.
This issue might be used by the concretist to dismiss Ehring’s objection. Recall Grossmann’s charge that Armstrong, by violating Grossmann’s axiom of localisation, is an ‘impure naturalist’ (Sect. 8.2). Analogously, the concretist (naturalist) need not believe that intuitions and principles for perceptions of the distances or other spatial relations between particulars be transferable without further ado to intuitions and principles for perceptions of spatial relations between universals.
- 6.
He also briefly entertains two other renderings of the category-response than the one I have stated, which in his view clearly are not question-begging. The category-response, he claims, might be read as either denying that the contradictory (2) follows from (1) above, or as denying that in (LER) U at L is identical to U at L′. However, as to the first reading, I have no idea of how this might be justified. And concerning the second, this clearly does not work, since the identity of U at L and U at L′ is a truism that follows from the very definition of universals as being numerically identical across their instances. In any case, either reading is too briefly stated to show precisely why Ehring thinks the category-response is ‘possibly guilty of begging the question’.
- 7.
- 8.
Armstrong proposes a fourth idea (1988, p. 112) in connection with this third one—and confusingly not clearly separated from it—viz. that the causal theories of space (and time) might offer hope of reducing spatial (and temporal) relations to the causal relation.
- 9.
Further support for a view similar to Armstrong’s third suggestion can be found in Magalhães (2006). Even better, Magalhães defends his position for both monadic and relational universals. Employing state of affairs locution astutely, he contends that universals are spatiotemporal only ‘derivatively’ by being constituents of states of affairs which are so ‘primarily’.
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Meinertsen, B.R. (2018). Concrete Universals. In: Metaphysics of States of Affairs. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 136. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3068-1_8
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