THE ASCENT FROM NOMINALISM PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES Editors: WILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh KEITH LEHRER, University of Arizona Board of Consulting Editors: J ON A THAN BENNETT, Syracuse University ALLAN GIBBARD, University of Michigan ROBERT STALNAKER, Cornell University ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University VOLUME 37 TERR Y PENNER Department of Philosophy, The University of Wisconsin at Madison, U.S.A. THE ASCENT FROM NOMINALISM Some Existence Arguments in Plato's Middle Dialogues D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY ~~ A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER . ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP DORDRECHTj BOSTONj LANCASTERjTOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Penner, Terry, 1936- The ascent from nominalism. (Philosophical studies series; v. 37) Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. Plato. 2. Aristotle. 3. Metaphysics-History. 4. Nominalism-History. I. Title. II. Series. B395.P347 1987 111'.2'0924 86·31641 ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8186-3 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3791-8 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3791-8 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. All Rights Reserved © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint of the hardcover I 5t edition 1987 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical induding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Much of this work was conceived and executed between 1971 and 1975, though some of it was done much earlier, and a few bits are quite recent. My greatest intellectual debts, other than to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, are first to my teach~rs in Gr~ek philosophy, Gilbert Ryle, G.E.L. Owen and John Ackrill, and, perhaps most influential of all, my for­ lIer colleague Gregory Vlastos; second, to the wr i tings of Frege and Quine; also to related writings of Geach, Church, Goodman, Carnap and Kaplan; third, to writings in philosophy of mathematics by Godel, Bernays, Church, Hilbert, Weyl, Gentzen, Goodstein and Boolos; .fourth, to writings of such modern causal theorists as Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Stampe; fifth, to conversations with Gilbert Harman (on Quine), Montgomery Furth, Mark Steiner, Richard Kraut (on Aristotle's universals vs Plato's Forms). Alan Code (on Quine's attitude to the paradoxes), Dennis Stampe and Berent Ene;; and also to a conversation (for so I call it) that I overheard between Richard Rorty and Fred Dretske on whether or not the world was we 11 lost. Readers who know Putnam's 'On Properties' and Sellars's 'Grammar and Existence' will recognize how lIuch lowe to those important papers. Two books that I read in the early 1970's encouraged me to con­ tinue on this Platonist venture once I was embarked on it: Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (in spite of its Wi ttgensteinianism) and Cudworth's Treatise on Eternal and ImlRutable Moral ity (in spite of its Cartesianism and its idealism) . Various different versions of the essential arguments of §§1-7 and 9 of 'The Nominalist' were presented at the Uni­ versity of Minnesota in Fall i973; to the Western Division of the A.P.A. in April 1974 (to which Marc Cohen read an ex­ tremely helpful reply); and in the spring of 1975 to Simon Fraser Uni versi ty. The material of §8 was presented at a Plato conference at the University of Marquette in Spring 1976, and, in an improved version, as a last minute substi­ tute paper at the A.P.A. in May 1985. Except for §6, 'Aris- v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS totle's Dilemma' was written for my graduate seminars at the University of Calgary in spring 1975. Clarifications II and III were written for my students at Wisconsin in the later 1970's, in order to introduce them to certain views of Pla­ tonic passages which were in opposition to my own. (But the objections to Shorey and Hackforth in the former go back to my graduate seminars at Princeton in the 1960's). Clarification VI, on the 'Third Man Argument', is really a separate story. For an account of my debts in that work see p. 404, n. 2. To all the audiences I mention, for questions and diffi­ culties, my thanks. lowe a huge debt to Joan Kung, who selflessly and gen­ erously took the time to give me a mass of extremely helpful detai led comments on the penul t imate draft. Many improve­ ments in the present draft lowe to her suggestions. She also attended some of the seminars in the mid 1970's from which this book grew, and there too forced me to improve what I was saying. Robert Turnbull also read the entire pen­ ultimate draft and gave me much good advice. Valuable com­ ments of Keith Lehrer's pushed me to clarify my attitude to Russell as a Platonist in the Introduction. But my greatest debt by far is to several generations of undergraduate and graduate students at Wisconsin--far too many to mention. Jor special and numerous contributions to this manuscript, I must however mention David Ring, Tony Chu, George Rudebusch, Ruth Saunders, Lila Luce, Alan Code, Harry Nieves, Paul Warren, Marty Barrett, Melinda Hogan and Donna Rae McCormick. The last three undertook to proofread the manuscript for me, and ended up making so many useful suggestions for small changes resul ting in vast improve­ ments, that the original final version became a penultimate version, and I' ended up being responsible for my own proof­ reading. Finally, I must also single out, as a prime source of learning for me, working on the passages discussed here in undergraduate tutorials. I consider myself fortunate indeed to have worked with so many most extraordinarily tal­ ented young people. This book is certainly the better for that good fortune. The earliest financial support of this work came from a summer research grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1973, for some work on identity and the rule of substitution of identicals as applied to thinking about Pla­ to's parts of the soul doctrine and Freud's mature doctrine of the ego, id and super-ego. This work took a more general ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii turn, and became a study of Fregean attitudes to ontology (connected with this work on ipentity in psychological con­ texts) and the effect of such ettitudes on our understanding of Plato. [See p. 339f of the present volume for some in­ dications of my treatment of Pireud and Plato on parts of the psyche.] The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin also supported the very beginning of this work in a research grant for the fall of 1974--a study of Plato's Forms and the paradoxes of logic, semantics and set theory. [Work done then is embodied in the present volume especially in Clari­ fication VI as well as in p. 346, n. 43 and p. 358, n. 53.] The Graduate School also gave me a grant for technical help in preparing the manuscript in the academic year 1985-86. Both The Ascent from Nominalism and the next volume I shall be publishing, Plato and the Philosophers of Language, in an important sense grew out of the work supported in the early 1970's by the ACLS and by the Graduate School, and I am ex­ tremely grateful to those two bodies for the essential part they played in the (eventual) appearance of this work. In preparation of the camera-ready manuscript, I have principally to thank Janet Holt, Scott Berman and, especial­ ly, Donna McCormick; and for related technical help, Anne Gunther, Dave Dean, Ginny Krohn, Read Gilgen, and, especial­ ly, Don Crawford and Berent En~. I was also assisted in countless ways, both large and small, by John, Jane and Louise Penner; and especially by Rosemary Penner, to whom this work is dedicated. PREPACE When I started out as a teacher of Greek phi losophy, I wasn't clear on exactly how it was that Aristotle differed from Plato on the existence of universals. But I felt sure that, with his greater subtlety and greater feel for what we now call the 'logical form' of statements about things and attributes, it was Aristotle, of the two of them, who was the more likely to be right. So too with Plato's infinite regress argument known as 'the Third Man', which Aristotle thought fatal to the theory of Forms: without being clear exactly how, I felt sure Aristotelian universals would be more defensible against such infinite regresses than the Platonic Forms. Not only were Aristotle's positions more moderate and sensible-looking, and based upon a wider range of logical and grammatical distinctions--of a sort that stu­ dents of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and Ryle would be sen­ sitive to; it was also the case that Plato's rather extreme views seemed all too emotionally surcharged with mystical and ascetic longings brought on by epistemological and even political disappointments with the world of temporal flux. The philosophical errors were deep, it is true; but they un­ doubtedly called for patient and detailed diagnosis from a logically and linguistically discriminating standpoint. I was aware of intellectual currents running against the Aristotelian passion for simply getting the logical form right and then letting the ontology look after itself.